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Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions. However, current PbRL methods face a critical challenge in effectively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Brahim Driss , Alex Davey , Riad Akrour

In this paper we model the problem of learning preferences of a population as an active learning problem. We propose an algorithm can adaptively choose pairs of items to show to users coming from a heterogeneous population, and use the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-06-23 Aniruddha Bhargava , Ravi Ganti , Robert Nowak

In this paper, we investigate the problem of offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) with human feedback where feedback is available in the form of preference between trajectory pairs rather than explicit rewards. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) entails a variety of approaches for aligning models with human intent to alleviate the burden of reward engineering. However, most previous PbRL work has not investigated the robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sara Rajaram , R. James Cotton , Fabian H. Sinz

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

For effective real-world deployment, robots should adapt to human preferences, such as balancing distance, time, and safety in delivery routing. Active preference learning (APL) learns human reward functions by presenting trajectories for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Yi-Shiuan Tung , Bradley Hayes , Alessandro Roncone

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success, but aligning them with human preferences remains a core challenge. As individuals have their own, multi-dimensional preferences, recent studies have explored multi-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Minhyeon Oh , Seungjoon Lee , Jungseul Ok

Active reinforcement learning (ARL) is a variant on reinforcement learning where the agent does not observe the reward unless it chooses to pay a query cost c > 0. The central question of ARL is how to quantify the long-term value of reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-26 David Krueger , Jan Leike , Owain Evans , John Salvatier

Inferring reward functions from demonstrations and pairwise preferences are auspicious approaches for aligning Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents with human intentions. However, state-of-the art methods typically focus on learning a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-04 Markus Peschl , Arkady Zgonnikov , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano C. Siebert

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) methods provide a solution to avoid reward engineering by learning reward models based on human preferences. However, poor feedback- and sample- efficiency still remain the problems that hinder…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hexian Ni , Tao Lu , Haoyuan Hu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) enables policy learning through simple queries comparing trajectories from a single policy. While human responses to these queries make it possible to learn policies aligned with human…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Yuki Kadokawa , Jonas Frey , Takahiro Miki , Takamitsu Matsubara , Marco Hutter

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Heewoong Choi , Sangwon Jung , Hongjoon Ahn , Taesup Moon

Explicit engineering of reward functions for given environments has been a major hindrance to reinforcement learning methods. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a solution to recover reward functions from demonstrations only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 David Venuto , Jhelum Chakravorty , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Gavin McCracken , Doina Precup

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Yihuan Mao , Jin Zhang , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Xu Yang , Runpeng Xie , Yi Fan , Bo Liu , Yang Gao , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Designing reward functions is a challenging problem in AI and robotics. Humans usually have a difficult time directly specifying all the desirable behaviors that a robot needs to optimize. One common approach is to learn reward functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Erdem Bıyık , Nicolas Huynh , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Dorsa Sadigh

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) circumvents the need for reward engineering by harnessing human preferences as the reward signal. However, current PbRL methods excessively depend on high-quality feedback from domain experts,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jie Cheng , Gang Xiong , Xingyuan Dai , Qinghai Miao , Yisheng Lv , Fei-Yue Wang

Reward modelling from preference data is a crucial step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring robust generalisation to novel prompt-response pairs. In this work, we propose to frame this problem in a causal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Katarzyna Kobalczyk , Mihaela van der Schaar

This paper proposes an active learning (AL) algorithm to solve regression problems based on inverse-distance weighting functions for selecting the feature vectors to query. The algorithm has the following features: (i) supports both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Alberto Bemporad

Transfer of recent advances in deep reinforcement learning to real-world applications is hindered by high data demands and thus low efficiency and scalability. Through independent improvements of components such as replay buffers or more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-28 André Eberhard , Houssam Metni , Georg Fahland , Alexander Stroh , Pascal Friederich