Related papers: Reward Shaping for User Satisfaction in a REINFORC…
Persuasion dialogue systems reflect the machine's ability to make strategic moves beyond verbal communication, and therefore differentiate themselves from task-oriented or open-domain dialogue systems and have their own unique values.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) can align language models with non-differentiable reward signals, such as human preferences. However, a major challenge arises from the sparsity of these reward signals - typically, there is only a single reward…
The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents improve through trial-and-error, but when reward is sparse and the agent cannot discover successful action sequences, learning stagnates. This has been a notable problem in training deep RL agents to…
Reinforcement Learning-based Recommender Systems (RLRS) have shown promise across a spectrum of applications, from e-commerce platforms to streaming services. Yet, they grapple with challenges, notably in crafting reward functions and…
Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…
Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However,…
Interactive reinforcement learning agents use human feedback or instruction to help them learn in complex environments. Often, this feedback comes in the form of a discrete signal that is either positive or negative. While informative, this…
Recommender System (RS) is an important online application that affects billions of users every day. The mainstream RS ranking framework is composed of two parts: a Multi-Task Learning model (MTL) that predicts various user feedback, i.e.,…
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…
Understanding user satisfaction with conversational systems, known as User Satisfaction Estimation (USE), is essential for assessing dialogue quality and enhancing user experiences. However, existing methods for USE face challenges due to…
When assisting human users in reinforcement learning (RL), we can represent users as RL agents and study key parameters, called \emph{user traits}, to inform intervention design. We study the relationship between user behaviors (policy…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have enabled understanding webpage contexts, product details, and human instructions. Utilizing LLMs as the foundational architecture for either reward models or policies in reinforcement…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated strong potential in training large language models (LLMs) capable of complex reasoning for real-world problem solving. More recently, RL has been leveraged to create sophisticated LLM-based…
In classic reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making problems, policies are evaluated with respect to a scalar reward function, and all optimal policies are the same with regards to their expected return. However, many real-world…
Modeling user sequential behaviors has recently attracted increasing attention in the recommendation domain. Existing methods mostly assume coherent preference in the same sequence. However, user personalities are volatile and easily…
In online advertising, recommender systems try to propose items from a list of products to potential customers according to their interests. Such systems have been increasingly deployed in E-commerce due to the rapid growth of information…
Information gathering in a partially observable environment can be formulated as a reinforcement learning (RL), problem where the reward depends on the agent's uncertainty. For example, the reward can be the negative entropy of the agent's…
We study a class of constrained reinforcement learning (RL) problems in which multiple constraint specifications are not identified before training. It is challenging to identify appropriate constraint specifications due to the undefined…
Search-augmented large language models (LLMs) trained with reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved strong results on open-domain question answering (QA), but training still remains a significant challenge. The optimization is often…