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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 (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

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

In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) leverages the in-context learning capabilities of transformer models (TMs) to efficiently generalize to unseen sequential decision-making tasks without parameter updates. However, existing ICRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Juncheng Dong , Bowen He , Moyang Guo , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Vahid Tarokh

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for teaching robots complex behaviors without reward engineering. However, its effectiveness is often limited by two critical challenges: the reliance on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Ruiqi Wang , Dezhong Zhao , Ziqin Yuan , Tianyu Shao , Guohua Chen , Dominic Kao , Sungeun Hong , Byung-Cheol Min

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yachen Kang , Diyuan Shi , Jinxin Liu , Li He , Donglin Wang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses explicit reward engineering by inferring reward functions from human preference comparisons, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, humans often struggle to label a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Ni Mu , Hao Hu , Xiao Hu , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu , Qing-Shan Jia

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) promises to learn a complex reward function with binary human preference. However, such human-in-the-loop formulation requires considerable human effort to assign preference labels to segment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Yachen Kang , Li He , Jinxin Liu , Zifeng Zhuang , Donglin Wang

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), designing precise reward functions remains to be a challenge, particularly when aligning with human intent. Preference-based RL (PbRL) was introduced to address this problem by learning reward models from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Heewoong Choi , Sangwon Jung , Hongjoon Ahn , Taesup Moon

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

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

Learning from Preferences in Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) has gained attention recently, as it serves as a natural fit for complicated tasks where the reward function is not easily available. However, preferences often come with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yuxuan Li , Harshith Reddy Kethireddy , Srijita Das

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

In this paper, we address the issue of fairness in preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in the presence of multiple objectives. The main objective is to design control policies that can optimize multiple objectives while treating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Umer Siddique , Abhinav Sinha , Yongcan Cao

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) learns directly from the preferences of human teachers regarding agent behaviors without needing meticulously designed reward functions. However, existing PBRL methods often learn primarily…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Ziang Liu , Junjie Xu , Xingjiao Wu , Jing Yang , Liang He

This paper explores multiple optimization methods to improve the performance of rating-based reinforcement learning (RbRL). RbRL, a method based on the idea of human ratings, has been developed to infer reward functions in reward-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Evelyn Rose , Devin White , Mingkang Wu , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

We present Preference Flow Matching (PFM), a new framework for preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) that streamlines the integration of preferences into an arbitrary class of pre-trained models. Existing PbRL methods require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Minu Kim , Yongsik Lee , Sehyeok Kang , Jihwan Oh , Song Chong , Se-Young Yun

Many sequential decision-making tasks involve optimizing multiple conflicting objectives, requiring policies that adapt to different user preferences. In multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), one widely studied approach} addresses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Ying-Tu Chen , Wei Hung , Bing-Shu Wu , Zhang-Wei Hong , Ping-Chun Hsieh