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Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a popular paradigm for aligning models with human intent. Typically RLHF algorithms operate in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward function and second,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Joey Hejna , Rafael Rafailov , Harshit Sikchi , Chelsea Finn , Scott Niekum , W. Bradley Knox , Dorsa Sadigh

Value function approximation has demonstrated phenomenal empirical success in reinforcement learning (RL). Nevertheless, despite a handful of recent progress on developing theory for RL with linear function approximation, the understanding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-22 Ruosong Wang , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Lin F. Yang

Value function approximation is important in modern reinforcement learning (RL) problems especially when the state space is (infinitely) large. Despite the importance and wide applicability of value function approximation, its theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-24 Hanlin Zhu , Ruosong Wang , Jason D. Lee

We study online preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) with the goal of improving sample efficiency. While a growing body of theoretical work has emerged-motivated by PbRL's recent empirical success, particularly in aligning large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Joongkyu Lee , Seouh-won Yi , Min-hwan Oh

We study the problem of deployment efficient reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation under the \emph{reward-free} exploration setting. This is a well-motivated problem because deploying new policies is costly in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-23 Dan Qiao , Yu-Xiang Wang

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

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is a structured approach for optimizing tasks with multiple objectives. However, it often relies on pre-defined reward functions, which can be hard to design for balancing conflicting goals and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Ni Mu , Yao Luan , Qing-Shan Jia

Learning from human involvement aims to incorporate the human subject to monitor and correct agent behavior errors. Although most interactive imitation learning methods focus on correcting the agent's action at the current state, they do…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Haoyuan Cai , Zhenghao Peng , Bolei Zhou

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

We study reinforcement learning (RL) for decision processes with non-Markovian reward, in which high-level knowledge of the task in the form of reward machines is available to the learner. We consider probabilistic reward machines with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Hippolyte Bourel , Anders Jonsson , Odalric-Ambrym Maillard , Chenxiao Ma , Mohammad Sadegh Talebi

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) aligns a robot behavior with human preferences via a reward function learned from binary feedback over agent behaviors. We show that dynamics-aware reward functions improve the sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Katherine Metcalf , Miguel Sarabia , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is emerging as a promising approach to teaching robots through human comparative feedback, sidestepping the need for complex reward engineering. However, the substantial volume of feedback…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Ruiqi Wang , Dezhong Zhao , Ziqin Yuan , Ike Obi , Byung-Cheol Min

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents optimize only the features specified in a reward function and are indifferent to anything left out inadvertently. This means that we must not only specify what to do, but also the much larger space of what…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-22 Rohin Shah , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov , Jordan Alexander , Pieter Abbeel , Anca Dragan

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

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) 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.…

We study reinforcement learning (RL) with linear function approximation. For episodic time-inhomogeneous linear Markov decision processes (linear MDPs) whose transition probability can be parameterized as a linear function of a given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Jiafan He , Heyang Zhao , Dongruo Zhou , Quanquan Gu

Standard reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find an optimal policy that identifies the best action for each state. However, in healthcare settings, many actions may be near-equivalent with respect to the reward (e.g., survival). We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-27 Shengpu Tang , Aditya Modi , Michael W. Sjoding , Jenna Wiens

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

To integrate into human-centered environments, autonomous agents must learn from and adapt to humans in their native settings. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable this by learning reward functions from human…