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Related papers: Preference elicitation and inverse reinforcement l…

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Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods are ideal for safe imitation learning, as they allow a learning agent to reason about reward uncertainty and the safety of a learned policy. However, Bayesian IRL is computationally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-11 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum

Humans generally use natural language to communicate task requirements to each other. Ideally, natural language should also be usable for communicating goals to autonomous machines (e.g., robots) to minimize friction in task specification.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Li Zhou , Kevin Small

In this work, we study an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem where the experts are planning under a shared reward function but with different, unknown planning horizons. Without the knowledge of discount factors, the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jiayu Yao , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez , Barbara E Engelhardt

We study the learning problem of revealed preference in a stochastic setting: a learner observes the utility-maximizing actions of a set of agents whose utility follows some unknown distribution, and the learner aims to infer the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-06-06 John R. Birge , Xiaocheng Li , Chunlin Sun

We introduce and study the problem of detecting whether an agent is updating their prior beliefs given new evidence in an optimal way that is Bayesian, or whether they are biased towards their own prior. In our model, biased agents form…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Yiling Chen , Tao Lin , Ariel D. Procaccia , Aaditya Ramdas , Itai Shapira

In this paper we present a new way of predicting the performance of a reinforcement learning policy given historical data that may have been generated by a different policy. The ability to evaluate a policy from historical data is important…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Philip S. Thomas , Emma Brunskill

We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 Federico Echenique , Anqi Li

The famous Policy Iteration algorithm alternates between policy improvement and policy evaluation. Implementations of this algorithm with several variants of the latter evaluation stage, e.g, $n$-step and trace-based returns, have been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Yonathan Efroni , Gal Dalal , Bruno Scherrer , Shie Mannor

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Youssef Abdelkareem , Shady Shehata , Fakhri Karray

Learning from human preferences is a cornerstone of aligning machine learning models with subjective human judgments. Yet, collecting such preference data is often costly and time-consuming, motivating the need for more efficient learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Matteo Cercola , Valeria Capretti , Simone Formentin

While recent progress has spawned very powerful machine learning systems, those agents remain extremely specialized and fail to transfer the knowledge they gain to similar yet unseen tasks. In this paper, we study a simple reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Remi Tachet , Philip Bachman , Harm van Seijen

Various methods for solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem have been developed independently in machine learning and economics. In particular, the method of Maximum Causal Entropy IRL is based on the perspective of entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Navyata Sanghvi , Shinnosuke Usami , Mohit Sharma , Joachim Groeger , Kris Kitani

Reinforcement learning is a general method for learning in sequential settings, but it can often be difficult to specify a good reward function when the task is complex. In these cases, preference feedback or expert demonstrations can be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jason R Brown , Carl Henrik Ek , Robert D Mullins

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shenao Zhang , Zhihan Liu , Boyi Liu , Yufeng Zhang , Yingxiang Yang , Yongfei Liu , Liyu Chen , Tao Sun , Zhaoran Wang

We introduce a new algorithm for multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) with linear preferences, with the goal of enabling few-shot adaptation to new tasks. In MORL, the aim is to learn policies over multiple competing objectives…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-07 Runzhe Yang , Xingyuan Sun , Karthik Narasimhan

Implicit feedback (e.g., clicks, dwell times, etc.) is an abundant source of data in human-interactive systems. While implicit feedback has many advantages (e.g., it is inexpensive to collect, user centric, and timely), its inherent biases…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2016-08-17 Thorsten Joachims , Adith Swaminathan , Tobias Schnabel

We study the problem of eliciting the preferences of a decision-maker through a moderate number of pairwise comparison queries to make them a high quality recommendation for a specific problem. We are motivated by applications in high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-09 Phebe Vayanos , Yingxiao Ye , Duncan McElfresh , John Dickerson , Eric Rice

This effort is focused on examining the behavior of reinforcement learning systems in personalization environments and detailing the differences in policy entropy associated with the type of learning algorithm utilized. We demonstrate that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-30 Anton Dereventsov , Andrew Starnes , Clayton G. Webster

We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-05 Georgy Lukyanov , Vasilii Ivanik