English

Listwise Reward Estimation for Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

Machine Learning 2024-08-09 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), designing precise reward functions remains to be a challenge, particularly when aligning with human intent. Preference-based RL (PbRL) was introduced to address this problem by learning reward models from human feedback. However, existing PbRL methods have limitations as they often overlook the second-order preference that indicates the relative strength of preference. In this paper, we propose Listwise Reward Estimation (LiRE), a novel approach for offline PbRL that leverages second-order preference information by constructing a Ranked List of Trajectories (RLT), which can be efficiently built by using the same ternary feedback type as traditional methods. To validate the effectiveness of LiRE, we propose a new offline PbRL dataset that objectively reflects the effect of the estimated rewards. Our extensive experiments on the dataset demonstrate the superiority of LiRE, i.e., outperforming state-of-the-art baselines even with modest feedback budgets and enjoying robustness with respect to the number of feedbacks and feedback noise. Our code is available at https://github.com/chwoong/LiRE

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.04190,
  title  = {Listwise Reward Estimation for Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Heewoong Choi and Sangwon Jung and Hongjoon Ahn and Taesup Moon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.04190},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

21 pages, ICML 2024

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:07:16.181Z