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Reinforcement learning studies how to balance exploration and exploitation in real-world systems, optimizing interactions with the world while simultaneously learning how the world operates. One general class of algorithms for such learning…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-08-10 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yi Liu , Gaurav Datta , Ellen Novoseller , Daniel S. Brown

Despite remarkable successes, deep reinforcement learning algorithms remain sample inefficient: they require an enormous amount of trial and error to find good policies. Model-based algorithms promise sample efficiency by building an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Remo Sasso , Michelangelo Conserva , Paulo Rauber

Posterior sampling allows exploitation of prior knowledge on the environment's transition dynamics to improve the sample efficiency of reinforcement learning. The prior is typically specified as a class of parametric distributions, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Mirco Mutti , Riccardo De Santi , Marcello Restelli , Alexander Marx , Giorgia Ramponi

Recently, various auxiliary tasks have been proposed to accelerate representation learning and improve sample efficiency in deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, existing auxiliary tasks do not take the characteristics of RL problems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Guoqing Liu , Chuheng Zhang , Li Zhao , Tao Qin , Jinhua Zhu , Jian Li , Nenghai Yu , Tie-Yan Liu

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a computational approach to reward-driven learning in sequential decision problems. It implements the discovery of optimal actions by learning from an agent interacting with an environment rather than from…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-10-06 Mauricio Tec , Yunshan Duan , Peter Müller

Bayesian reinforcement learning (BRL) is a method that merges principles from Bayesian statistics and reinforcement learning to make optimal decisions in uncertain environments. As a model-based RL method, it has two key components: (1)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-03 Shreya Sinha Roy , Richard G. Everitt , Christian P. Robert , Ritabrata Dutta

Restless multi-armed bandits (RMAB) has been widely used to model constrained sequential decision making problems, where the state of each restless arm evolves according to a Markov chain and each state transition generates a scalar reward.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Guojun Xiong , Ujwal Dinesha , Debajoy Mukherjee , Jian Li , Srinivas Shakkottai

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has shown impressive capabilities in training agents without reward engineering. However, a notable limitation of PbRL is its dependency on substantial human feedback. This dependency stems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Fengshuo Bai , Rui Zhao , Hongming Zhang , Sijia Cui , Ying Wen , Yaodong Yang , Bo Xu , Lei Han

We consider Bayesian optimization in settings where observations can be adversarially biased, for example by an uncontrolled hidden confounder. Our first contribution is a reduction of the confounded setting to the dueling bandit model.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-10 Johannes Kirschner , Andreas Krause

The dueling bandit problem, an essential variation of the traditional multi-armed bandit problem, has become significantly prominent recently due to its broad applications in online advertising, recommendation systems, information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Bongsoo Yi , Yue Kang , Yao Li

Real-world applications of reinforcement learning for recommendation and experimentation faces a practical challenge: the relative reward of different bandit arms can evolve over the lifetime of the learning agent. To deal with these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Srivas Chennu , Andrew Maher , Jamie Martin , Subash Prabanantham

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Alizée Pace , Bernhard Schölkopf , Gunnar Rätsch , Giorgia Ramponi

Reinforcement learning provides a framework for learning to control which actions to take towards completing a task through trial-and-error. In many applications observing interactions is costly, necessitating sample-efficient learning. In…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-11-04 Charles Gadd , Markus Heinonen , Harri Lähdesmäki , Samuel Kaski

Aligning large language models with human preferences is critical for creating reliable and controllable AI systems. A human preference can be visualized as a high-dimensional vector where different directions represent trade-offs between…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Ruochen Mao , Yuling Shi , Xiaodong Gu , Jiaheng Wei

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

Offline reinforcement learning refers to the process of learning policies from fixed datasets, without requiring additional environment interaction. However, it often relies on well-defined reward functions, which are difficult and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Xiancheng Gao , Yufeng Shi , Wengang Zhou , Houqiang Li

For a real-world decision-making problem, the reward function often needs to be engineered or learned. A popular approach is to utilize human feedback to learn a reward function for training. The most straightforward way to do so is to ask…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Xiang Ji , Huazheng Wang , Minshuo Chen , Tuo Zhao , Mengdi Wang

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (RL), which focuses on optimizing policies using human preferences between pairs of trajectory segments selected from an offline dataset, has emerged as a practical avenue for RL applications.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Chen-Xiao Gao , Shengjun Fang , Chenjun Xiao , Yang Yu , Zongzhang Zhang

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-24 Viraj Mehta , Ojash Neopane , Vikramjeet Das , Sen Lin , Jeff Schneider , Willie Neiswanger