English
Related papers

Related papers: Dueling RL: Reinforcement Learning with Trajectory…

200 papers

We study reinforcement learning from human feedback in general Markov decision processes, where agents learn from trajectory-level preference comparisons. A central challenge in this setting is to design algorithms that select informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Reda Ouhamma , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has recently surged in popularity, particularly for aligning large language models and other AI systems with human intentions. At its core, RLHF can be viewed as a specialized instance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Yujie Zhao , Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamill , Weyl Lu , Huazheng Wang

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

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

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

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful tool for neural combinatorial optimization, enabling models to learn heuristics that solve complex problems without requiring expert knowledge. Despite significant progress, existing RL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Mingjun Pan , Guanquan Lin , You-Wei Luo , Bin Zhu , Zhien Dai , Lijun Sun , Chun Yuan

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

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) provides a framework to train agents using human preferences between two behaviors. However, preference-based RL has been challenging to scale since it requires a large amount of human feedback…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-03 Changyeon Kim , Jongjin Park , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Kimin Lee

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xiao Hu , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

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

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) provides a way to learn high-performance policies in environments where the reward signal is hard to specify, avoiding heuristic and time-consuming reward design. However, PbRL can suffer from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Chenyang Cao , Miguel Rogel-García , Mohamed Nabail , Xueqian Wang , Nicholas Rhinehart

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a powerful paradigm to avoid meticulous reward engineering by learning rewards based on human preferences. However, real-time human feedback is hard to obtain in online tasks. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Songjun Tu , Jingbo Sun , Qichao Zhang , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongbin Zhao

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is a suitable approach for style adaptation of pre-trained robotic behavior: adapting the robot's policy to follow human user preferences while still being able to perform the original task.…

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires access to a reward function that incentivizes the right behavior, but these are notoriously hard to specify for complex tasks. Preference-based RL provides an alternative: learning policies using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Anca Dragan , Pieter Abbeel

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a standard paradigm for safety-critical decision making. However, real-world safety constraints can be complex, subjective, and even hard to explicitly specify. Existing works on constraint inference rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Chenglin Li , Grant Ruan , Hua Geng

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

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