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For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 David Lindner , Matteo Turchetta , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Kamil Ciosek , Andreas Krause

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) methods utilize binary feedback from the human in the loop (HiL) over queried trajectory pairs to learn a reward model in an attempt to approximate the human's underlying reward function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati

Learning policies via preference-based reward learning is an increasingly popular method for customizing agent behavior, but has been shown anecdotally to be prone to spurious correlations and reward hacking behaviors. While much prior work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-21 Jeremy Tien , Jerry Zhi-Yang He , Zackory Erickson , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

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

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

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for aligning policies with human intent but is often constrained by the high cost of human feedback. In this work, we introduce PrefVLM, a framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Udita Ghosh , Dripta S. Raychaudhuri , Jiachen Li , Konstantinos Karydis , Amit Roy-Chowdhury

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

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning allows the training of agents through various interfaces, even for non-expert humans. Recently, preference-based methods (PbRL), where the human has to give his preference over two trajectories,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jakob Karalus

The effectiveness of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in continuous control robotics tasks is mainly dependent on the design of the underlying reward function, which is highly prone to reward hacking. A misalignment between the reward…

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) has made significant strides in single-agent settings, but has not been studied for multi-agent frameworks. On the other hand, modeling cooperation between multiple agents, specifically,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Siddhant Bhambri , Mudit Verma , Upasana Biswas , Anil Murthy , Subbarao Kambhampati

Many reinforcement learning algorithms, particularly those that rely on return estimates for policy improvement, can suffer from poor sample efficiency and training instability due to high-variance return estimates. In this paper we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Alexander W. Goodall , Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

In complex tasks where the reward function is not straightforward and consists of a set of objectives, multiple reinforcement learning (RL) policies that perform task adequately, but employ different strategies can be trained by adjusting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Jasmina Gajcin , Rahul Nair , Tejaswini Pedapati , Radu Marinescu , Elizabeth Daly , Ivana Dusparic

Specifying rewards for reinforcement learned (RL) agents is challenging. Preference-based RL (PbRL) mitigates these challenges by inferring a reward from feedback over sets of trajectories. However, the effectiveness of PbRL is limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-20 Mudit Verma , Katherine Metcalf

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) in the offline setting has succeeded greatly in industrial applications such as chatbots. A two-step learning framework where one applies a reinforcement learning step after a reward modeling…

While reinforcement learning (RL) has become a more popular approach for robotics, designing sufficiently informative reward functions for complex tasks has proven to be extremely difficult due their inability to capture human intent and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

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

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara