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Reward design in reinforcement learning and optimal control is challenging. Preference-based alignment addresses this by enabling agents to learn rewards from ranked trajectory pairs provided by humans. However, existing methods often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhixian Xie , Haode Zhang , Yizhe Feng , Wanxin Jin

Empirical design in reinforcement learning is no small task. Running good experiments requires attention to detail and at times significant computational resources. While compute resources available per dollar have continued to grow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Andrew Patterson , Samuel Neumann , Martha White , Adam White

In this study, we apply reinforcement learning techniques and propose what we call reinforcement mechanism design to tackle the dynamic pricing problem in sponsored search auctions. In contrast to previous game-theoretical approaches that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-29 Weiran Shen , Binghui Peng , Hanpeng Liu , Michael Zhang , Ruohan Qian , Yan Hong , Zhi Guo , Zongyao Ding , Pengjun Lu , Pingzhong Tang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xiao Hu , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) is an approach that enables RL agents to learn from preference, which is particularly useful when formulating a reward function is challenging. Existing PbRL methods generally involve a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-30 Gaon An , Junhyeok Lee , Xingdong Zuo , Norio Kosaka , Kyung-Min Kim , Hyun Oh Song

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

We introduce the use of reinforcement learning for indirect mechanisms, working with the existing class of sequential price mechanisms, which generalizes both serial dictatorship and posted price mechanisms and essentially characterizes all…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-07 Gianluca Brero , Alon Eden , Matthias Gerstgrasser , David C. Parkes , Duncan Rheingans-Yoo

We study the problem of reinforcement learning in infinite-horizon discounted linear Markov decision processes (MDPs), and propose the first computationally efficient algorithm achieving rate-optimal regret guarantees in this setting. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Antoine Moulin , Gergely Neu , Luca Viano

We propose a new framework for imitation learning -- treating imitation as a two-player ranking-based game between a policy and a reward. In this game, the reward agent learns to satisfy pairwise performance rankings between behaviors,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Harshit Sikchi , Akanksha Saran , Wonjoon Goo , Scott Niekum

Preference-based learning of reward functions, where the reward function is learned using comparison data, has been well studied for complex robotic tasks such as autonomous driving. Existing algorithms have focused on learning reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-03-05 Sydney M. Katz , Amir Maleki , Erdem Bıyık , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

A recently popular approach to solving reinforcement learning is with data from human preferences. In fact, human preference data are now used with classic reinforcement learning algorithms such as actor-critic methods, which involve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Zihao Li , Xiang Ji , Minshuo Chen , Mengdi Wang

The ability of reinforcement learning algorithms to learn effective policies is determined by the rewards available during training. However, for practical problems, obtaining large quantities of reward labels is often infeasible due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Shreyas Chaudhari , Renhao Zhang , Philip S. Thomas , Bruno Castro da Silva

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with complex, history-dependent reward structures poses significant challenges for traditional methods. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages automaton-based feedback to guide…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Mahyar Alinejad , Alvaro Velasquez , Yue Wang , George Atia

We are interested in the design of autonomous robot behaviors that learn the preferences of users over continued interactions, with the goal of efficiently executing navigation behaviors in a way that the user expects. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-11-06 Cory Hayes , Matthew Marge

The standard feedback model of reinforcement learning requires revealing the reward of every visited state-action pair. However, in practice, it is often the case that such frequent feedback is not available. In this work, we take a first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-08 Yonathan Efroni , Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

In this paper, we consider combinatorial reinforcement learning with preference feedback, where a learning agent sequentially offers an action--an assortment of multiple items to--a user, whose preference feedback follows a multinomial…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-06-06 Joongkyu Lee , Min-hwan Oh

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) methods provide a solution to avoid reward engineering by learning reward models based on human preferences. However, poor feedback- and sample- efficiency still remain the problems that hinder…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hexian Ni , Tao Lu , Haoyuan Hu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) replaces hard-to-specify rewards with pairwise trajectory preferences, yet regret-oriented theory often assumes that preference labels are generated consistently from a single ground-truth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Ming Shi , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff , Ananthram Swami

We consider algorithms for learning reward functions from human preferences over pairs of trajectory segments, as used in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Most recent work assumes that human preferences are generated based…

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