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We consider the problem of contextual bandits and imitation learning, where the learner lacks direct knowledge of the executed action's reward. Instead, the learner can actively query an expert at each round to compare two actions and…
Personalization and recommendations are now accepted as core competencies in just about every online setting, ranging from media platforms to e-commerce to social networks. While the challenge of estimating user preferences has garnered…
We study the problem of using causal models to improve the rate at which good interventions can be learned online in a stochastic environment. Our formalism combines multi-arm bandits and causal inference to model a novel type of bandit…
We study a novel variant of the parameterized bandits problem in which the learner can observe additional auxiliary feedback that is correlated with the observed reward. The auxiliary feedback is readily available in many real-life…
We study human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (RL) with trajectory preferences, where instead of receiving a numeric reward at each step, the agent only receives preferences over trajectory pairs from a human overseer. The goal of the…
For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for…
Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions. However, current PbRL methods face a critical challenge in effectively…
What enables large language models (LLMs) to effectively model user preferences in sequential recommendation? Our investigation reveals that existing preference-alignment approaches largely rely on binary pairwise comparisons, overlooking…
User preference learning is generally a hard problem. Individual preferences are typically unknown even to users themselves, while the space of choices is infinite. Here we study user preference learning from information-theoretic…
Active learning methods have shown great promise in reducing the number of samples necessary for learning. As automated learning systems are adopted into real-time, real-world decision-making pipelines, it is increasingly important that…
Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in machine learning where evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. Notable recent examples arise in preference alignment for large language models, including in…
Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this…
Existing observational approaches for learning human preferences, such as inverse reinforcement learning, usually make strong assumptions about the observability of the human's environment. However, in reality, people make many important…
The objective of canonical multi-armed bandits is to identify and repeatedly select an arm with the largest reward, often in the form of the expected value of the arm's probability distribution. Such a utilitarian perspective and focus on…
Assistive multi-armed bandit problems can be used to model team situations between a human and an autonomous system like a domestic service robot. To account for human biases such as the risk-aversion described in the Cumulative Prospect…
We study the sequential resource allocation problem where a decision maker repeatedly allocates budgets between resources. Motivating examples include allocating limited computing time or wireless spectrum bands to multiple users (i.e.,…
We analyze the unintended effects that recommender systems have on the preferences of users that they are learning. We consider a contextual multi-armed bandit recommendation algorithm that learns optimal product recommendations based on…
Human demonstrations can provide trustful samples to train reinforcement learning algorithms for robots to learn complex behaviors in real-world environments. However, obtaining sufficient demonstrations may be impractical because many…
Unconscious bias has been shown to influence how we assess our peers, with consequences for hiring, promotions and admissions. In this work, we focus on affinity bias, the component of unconscious bias which leads us to prefer people who…
Expressive robotic behavior is essential for the widespread acceptance of robots in social environments. Recent advancements in learned legged locomotion controllers have enabled more dynamic and versatile robot behaviors. However,…