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Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Modern recommender systems aim to improve user experience. As reinforcement learning (RL) naturally fits this objective -- maximizing an user's reward per session -- it has become an emerging topic in recommender systems. Developing…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2022-06-16 Xin Xin , Tiago Pimentel , Alexandros Karatzoglou , Pengjie Ren , Konstantina Christakopoulou , Zhaochun Ren

Given an incomplete ratings data over a set of users and items, the preference completion problem aims to estimate a personalized total preference order over a subset of the items. In practical settings, a ranked list of top-$k$ items from…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2019-04-16 Shameem A Puthiya Parambath , Nishant Vijayakumar , Sanjay Chawla

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

Ranking and comparing items is crucial for collecting information about preferences in many areas, from marketing to politics. The Mallows rank model is among the most successful approaches to analyse rank data, but its computational…

Methodology · Statistics 2017-04-28 Valeria Vitelli , Øystein Sørensen , Marta Crispino , Arnoldo Frigessi , Elja Arjas

The conventional top-K recommendation, which presents the top-K items with the highest ranking scores, is a common practice for generating personalized ranking lists. However, is this fixed-size top-K recommendation the optimal approach for…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Wonbin Kweon , SeongKu Kang , Sanghwan Jang , Hwanjo Yu

Recent approaches in personalized reward modeling have primarily focused on leveraging user interaction history to align model judgments with individual preferences. However, existing approaches largely treat user context as a static or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Kwangwook Seo , Dongha Lee

This paper introduces a scalable approach for probabilistic top-k similarity ranking on uncertain vector data. Each uncertain object is represented by a set of vector instances that are assumed to be mutually-exclusive. The objective is to…

Databases · Computer Science 2009-07-17 Thomas Bernecker , Hans-Peter Kriegel , Nikos Mamoulis , Matthias Renz , Andreas Zuefle

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

Item recommendation is a personalized ranking task. To this end, many recommender systems optimize models with pairwise ranking objectives, such as the Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR). Using matrix Factorization (MF) --- the most widely…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2018-08-20 Xiangnan He , Zhankui He , Xiaoyu Du , Tat-Seng Chua

Users of music streaming, video streaming, news recommendation, and e-commerce services often engage with content in a sequential manner. Providing and evaluating good sequences of recommendations is therefore a central problem for these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 James McInerney , Brian Brost , Praveen Chandar , Rishabh Mehrotra , Ben Carterette

In this paper, we propose a listwise approach for constructing user-specific rankings in recommendation systems in a collaborative fashion. We contrast the listwise approach to previous pointwise and pairwise approaches, which are based on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-08 Liwei Wu , Cho-Jui Hsieh , James Sharpnack

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) is a paradigm in which an RL agent learns to optimize a task using pair-wise preference-based feedback over trajectories, rather than explicit reward signals. While PbRL has demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Wen Sun , Jason D. Lee

Recent research has employed reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms to optimize long-term user engagement in recommender systems, thereby avoiding common pitfalls such as user boredom and filter bubbles. They capture the sequential and…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-01-25 Romain Deffayet , Thibaut Thonet , Jean-Michel Renders , Maarten de Rijke

Personalized question recommendation aims to guide individual students through questions to enhance their mastery of learning targets. Most previous methods model this task as a Markov Decision Process and use reinforcement learning to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Haipeng Liu , Yuxuan Liu , Ting Long

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally shifted recommender systems from discriminative to generative paradigms, where user behavior modeling is achieved by generating target items conditioned on historical…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Junfei Tan , Yuxin Chen , An Zhang , Junguang Jiang , Bin Liu , Ziru Xu , Han Zhu , Jian Xu , Bo Zheng , Xiang Wang

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides an effective way to overcome the challenges of designing reward and the high costs of online interaction. However, since labeling preference needs real-time human feedback,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Xiao-Yin Liu , Guotao Li , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Zeng-Guang Hou

A recommender system generates personalized recommendations for a user by computing the preference score of items, sorting the items according to the score, and filtering top-K items with high scores. While sorting and ranking items are…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Hyunsung Lee , Yeongjae Jang , Jaekwang Kim , Honguk Woo