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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) enables policy learning through simple queries comparing trajectories from a single policy. While human responses to these queries make it possible to learn policies aligned with human…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Yuki Kadokawa , Jonas Frey , Takahiro Miki , Takamitsu Matsubara , Marco Hutter

Large language models~(LLMs) are expected to be helpful, harmless, and honest. In different alignment scenarios, such as safety, confidence, and general preference alignment, binary preference data collection and reward modeling are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shuai Zhao , Yunqiu Xu , Linchao Zhu , Yi Yang

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

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…

Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Rewards (RLRR) is a framework that extends conventional reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and verifiable rewards (RLVR) by replacing scalar preference signals with structured,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Guangchen Lan , Lian Xiong , Xin Zhou , Hejie Cui , Yuwei Zhang , Mao Li , Zhenyu Shi , Besnik Fetahu , Lihong Li , Xian Li

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

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have advanced radiology report generation (RRG), yet two core limitations persist: (1) report-level rewards offer limited evidence-grounded guidance for clinical faithfulness; and (2) current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Qin Zhou , Guoyan Liang , Qianyi Yang , Jingyuan Chen , Sai Wu , Chang Yao , Zhe Wang

With the increasing number of parameters in large pre-trained models, LoRA as a parameter-efficient fine-tuning(PEFT) method is widely used for not adding inference overhead. The LoRA method assumes that weight changes during fine-tuning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Jihao Gu , Shuai Chen , Zelin Wang , Yibo Zhang , Ping Gong

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explicitly infer an underlying reward function based on collected expert demonstrations. Considering that obtaining expert demonstrations can be costly, the focus of current IRL techniques is on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-16 Lu Li , Yuxin Pan , Ruobing Chen , Jie Liu , Zilin Wang , Yu Liu , Zhiheng Li

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

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

The main challenge in developing effective reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines is often the design and tuning the reward functions. Well-designed shaping reward can lead to significantly faster learning. Naively formulated rewards,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Se Hwan Jeon , Steve Heim , Charles Khazoom , Sangbae Kim

Reward learning is a fundamental problem in human-robot interaction to have robots that operate in alignment with what their human user wants. Many preference-based learning algorithms and active querying techniques have been proposed as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-05 Erdem Bıyık , Aditi Talati , Dorsa Sadigh

Ensuring reliability in modern software systems requires rigorous pre-production testing across highly heterogeneous and evolving environments. Because exhaustive evaluation is infeasible, practitioners must decide how to allocate limited…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Yu Zhu

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

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) 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

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models with human preferences, inspiring the development of reward-centric diffusion reinforcement learning (RDRL) to achieve similar…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Kwanyoung Kim , Byeongsu Sim

Contrastive learning has shown effectiveness in improving sequential recommendation models. However, existing methods still face challenges in generating high-quality contrastive pairs: they either rely on random perturbations that corrupt…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Ziqiang Cui , Yunpeng Weng , Xing Tang , Xiaokun Zhang , Shiwei Li , Peiyang Liu , Bowei He , Dugang Liu , Weihong Luo , Xiuqiang He , Chen Ma