English
Related papers

Related papers: Preference Optimization for Combinatorial Optimiza…

200 papers

Many real-world problems can be reduced to combinatorial optimization on a graph, where the subset or ordering of vertices that maximize some objective function must be found. With such tasks often NP-hard and analytically intractable,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Thomas D. Barrett , William R. Clements , Jakob N. Foerster , A. I. Lvovsky

Deep neural networks based on reinforcement learning (RL) for solving combinatorial optimization (CO) problems are developing rapidly and have shown a tendency to approach or even outperform traditional solvers. However, existing methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Chaoyang Wang , Pengzhi Cheng , Jingze Li , Weiwei Sun

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires skillful definition and remarkable computational efforts to solve optimization and control problems, which could impair its prospect. Introducing human guidance into reinforcement learning is a promising…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Jingda Wu , Zhiyu Huang , Wenhui Huang , Chen Lv

Reinforcement learning (RL) requires access to a reward function that incentivizes the right behavior, but these are notoriously hard to specify for complex tasks. Preference-based RL provides an alternative: learning policies using a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-05 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Anca Dragan , Pieter Abbeel

There has been significant progress in deep reinforcement learning (RL) in recent years. Nevertheless, finding suitable hyperparameter configurations and reward functions remains challenging even for experts, and performance heavily relies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Julian Dierkes , Emma Cramer , Holger H. Hoos , Sebastian Trimpe

Current advances in recommender systems have been remarkably successful in optimizing immediate engagement. However, long-term user engagement, a more desirable performance metric, remains difficult to improve. Meanwhile, recent…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Wanqi Xue , Qingpeng Cai , Zhenghai Xue , Shuo Sun , Shuchang Liu , Dong Zheng , Peng Jiang , Kun Gai , Bo An

An internet network service provider manages its network with multiple objectives, such as high quality of service (QoS) and minimum computing resource usage. To achieve these objectives, a reinforcement learning-based (RL) algorithm has…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2025-06-17 DongNyeong Heo , Daniela Noemi Rim , Heeyoul Choi

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

Preference alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly improved their ability to adhere to human instructions and intentions. However, existing direct alignment algorithms primarily focus on relative preferences and often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Shenao Zhang , Zhihan Liu , Boyi Liu , Yufeng Zhang , Yingxiang Yang , Yongfei Liu , Liyu Chen , Tao Sun , Zhaoran Wang

Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in sequential decision-making by leveraging the highly expressive model capabilities in policy learning. A central problem for learning diffusion policies is to align the policy output with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Zhao Shan , Chenyou Fan , Shuang Qiu , Jiyuan Shi , Chenjia Bai

Reinforcement learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) learns from preference signals, while standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) directly learns from reward signals. Preferences arguably contain less information than rewards, which makes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Yuanhao Wang , Qinghua Liu , Chi Jin

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yi Liu , Gaurav Datta , Ellen Novoseller , Daniel S. Brown

Solving tasks in Reinforcement Learning is no easy feat. As the goal of the agent is to maximize the accumulated reward, it often learns to exploit loopholes and misspecifications in the reward signal resulting in unwanted behavior. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Chen Tessler , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Shie Mannor

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

In this paper, we investigate preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), which enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn from human feedback. This is particularly valuable when defining a fine-grain reward function is not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Guojian Wang , Jianxiang Liu , Xinyuan Li , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Tianyuan Chen , Xuyang Chen

In Reinforcement Learning (abbreviated as RL), an agent interacts with the environment via a set of possible actions, and a reward is generated from some unknown distribution. The task here is to find an optimal set of actions such that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Aditi Anand , Suman Banerjee , Dildar Ali

We introduce a combinatorial optimization-enriched machine learning pipeline and a novel learning paradigm to solve inventory routing problems with stochastic demand and dynamic inventory updates. After each inventory update, our approach…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-08 Toni Greif , Louis Bouvier , Christoph M. Flath , Axel Parmentier , Sonja U. K. Rohmer , Thibaut Vidal

This paper focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) with limited prior knowledge. In the domain of swarm robotics for instance, the expert can hardly design a reward function or demonstrate the target behavior, forbidding the use of both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-08-07 Riad Akrour , Marc Schoenauer , Michèle Sebag

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and its variants have become the de facto standards for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences or specific goals. However, DPO requires high-quality preference data and suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-12 Zhuotong Chen , Fang Liu , Jennifer Zhu , Wanyu Du , Yanjun Qi