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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

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) enables agents to learn control policies without requiring manually designed reward functions, making it well-suited for tasks where objectives are difficult to formalize or inherently…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Colin Merk , Ismail Geles , Jiaxu Xing , Angel Romero , Giorgia Ramponi , Davide Scaramuzza

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

In machine learning for sequential decision-making, an algorithmic agent learns to interact with an environment while receiving feedback in the form of a reward signal. However, in many unstructured real-world settings, such a reward signal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Ellen Novoseller , Vinicius G. Goecks , David Watkins , Josh Miller , Nicholas Waytowich

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

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) has shown potential for teaching agents to perform the target tasks without a costly, pre-defined reward function by learning the reward with a supervisor's preference between the two agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Jongjin Park , Younggyo Seo , Jinwoo Shin , Honglak Lee , Pieter Abbeel , Kimin Lee

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

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is a standard paradigm for safety-critical decision making. However, real-world safety constraints can be complex, subjective, and even hard to explicitly specify. Existing works on constraint inference rely…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Chenglin Li , Grant Ruan , Hua Geng

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses complex reward engineering by learning rewards directly from human preferences, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, its effectiveness in multi-stage tasks, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yao Luan , Ni Mu , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu , Qing-Shan Jia

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms help avoid the pitfalls of hand-crafted reward functions by distilling them from human preference feedback, but they remain impractical due to the burdensome number of labels required…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-15 Katherine Metcalf , Miguel Sarabia , Barry-John Theobald

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…

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

Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior. However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tong Mu , Alec Helyar , Johannes Heidecke , Joshua Achiam , Andrea Vallone , Ian Kivlichan , Molly Lin , Alex Beutel , John Schulman , Lilian Weng

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

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

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,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Jaden Clark , Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a new field in robot learning, where humans play a pivotal role in shaping robot behavior by expressing preferences on different sequences of state-action pairs. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Simon Holk , Daniel Marta , Iolanda Leite

In preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a reward function is learned from a type of human feedback called preference. To expedite preference collection, recent works have leveraged \emph{offline preferences}, which are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Guoxi Zhang , Han Bao , Hisashi Kashima