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We study online preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) with the goal of improving sample efficiency. While a growing body of theoretical work has emerged-motivated by PbRL's recent empirical success, particularly in aligning large…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Joongkyu Lee , Seouh-won Yi , Min-hwan Oh

The complexity of designing reward functions has been a major obstacle to the wide application of deep reinforcement learning (RL) techniques. Describing an agent's desired behaviors and properties can be difficult, even for experts. A new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Wanqi Xue , Bo An , Shuicheng Yan , Zhongwen Xu

To integrate into human-centered environments, autonomous agents must learn from and adapt to humans in their native settings. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable this by learning reward functions from human…

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

Data generation and labeling are often expensive in robot learning. Preference-based learning is a concept that enables reliable labeling by querying users with preference questions. Active querying methods are commonly employed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Erdem Bıyık , Nima Anari , Dorsa Sadigh

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) bypasses explicit reward engineering by inferring reward functions from human preference comparisons, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, humans often struggle to label a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Ni Mu , Hao Hu , Xiao Hu , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu , Qing-Shan Jia

For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-01 David Lindner , Matteo Turchetta , Sebastian Tschiatschek , Kamil Ciosek , Andreas Krause

This study focuses on the topic of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), a variant of conventional reinforcement learning that dispenses with the need for online interaction or specification of reward functions. Instead,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-12 Yachen Kang , Diyuan Shi , Jinxin Liu , Li He , Donglin Wang

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has recently surged in popularity, particularly for aligning large language models and other AI systems with human intentions. At its core, RLHF can be viewed as a specialized instance of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-10 Yujie Zhao , Jose Efraim Aguilar Escamill , Weyl Lu , Huazheng Wang

Proactive Recommender Systems (PRSs) aim to guide user preference shift toward target items by generating paths of intermediate recommendations. Reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled framework for optimizing such sequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Hongru Hou , Tiehua Mei , Denghui Geng , Jinhui Huang , Ao Xu , Hengrui Chen , Jiaqing Liang , Deqing Yang

Preference-based reinforcement learning has gained prominence as a strategy for training agents in environments where the reward signal is difficult to specify or misaligned with human intent. However, its effectiveness is often limited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Jonathan Erskine , Taku Yamagata , Raúl Santos-Rodríguez

Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) is a structured approach for optimizing tasks with multiple objectives. However, it often relies on pre-defined reward functions, which can be hard to design for balancing conflicting goals and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-21 Ni Mu , Yao Luan , Qing-Shan Jia

Iterative data generation and model re-training can effectively align large language models(LLMs) to human preferences. The process of data sampling is crucial, as it significantly influences the success of policy improvement. Repeated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Hai Ye , Hwee Tou Ng

Offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) learns rewards and policies aligned with human preferences without the need for extensive reward engineering and direct interaction with human annotators. However, ensuring safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Ze Gong , Pradeep Varakantham , Akshat Kumar

Preference Based Reinforcement Learning has shown much promise for utilizing human binary feedback on queried trajectory pairs to recover the underlying reward model of the Human in the Loop (HiL). While works have attempted to better…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Siddhant Bhambri , Subbarao Kambhampati

In this work, we introduce PIPER: Primitive-Informed Preference-based Hierarchical reinforcement learning via Hindsight Relabeling, a novel approach that leverages preference-based learning to learn a reward model, and subsequently uses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Utsav Singh , Wesley A. Suttle , Brian M. Sadler , Vinay P. Namboodiri , Amrit Singh Bedi

Designing reward functions is a challenging problem in AI and robotics. Humans usually have a difficult time directly specifying all the desirable behaviors that a robot needs to optimize. One common approach is to learn reward functions…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Erdem Bıyık , Nicolas Huynh , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Dorsa Sadigh

Exploration is a fundamental aspect of reinforcement learning (RL), and its effectiveness is a deciding factor in the performance of RL algorithms, especially when facing sparse extrinsic rewards. Recent studies have shown the effectiveness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Shanchuan Wan , Yujin Tang , Yingtao Tian , Tomoyuki Kaneko

Reinforcement Learning has suffered from poor reward specification, and issues for reward hacking even in simple enough domains. Preference Based Reinforcement Learning attempts to solve the issue by utilizing binary feedbacks on queried…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-20 Mudit Verma , Subbarao Kambhampati

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