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In this paper, we study the problem of obtaining a control policy that can mimic and then outperform expert demonstrations in Markov decision processes where the reward function is unknown to the learning agent. One main relevant approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Feng Tao , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement learning (RL), a common tool in decision making, learns control policies from various experiences based on the associated cumulative return/rewards without treating them differently. Humans, on the contrary, often learn to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R. Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms allow artificial agents to improve their selection of actions to increase rewarding experiences in their environments. Temporal Difference (TD) Learning -- a model-free RL method -- is a leading…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-05 Jacob Rafati , David C. Noelle

Aligning human preference and value is an important requirement for building contemporary foundation models and embodied AI. However, popular approaches such as reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) break down the task into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Chenliang Li , Siliang Zeng , Zeyi Liao , Jiaxiang Li , Dongyeop Kang , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

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

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-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) leverages the in-context learning capabilities of transformer models (TMs) to efficiently generalize to unseen sequential decision-making tasks without parameter updates. However, existing ICRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Juncheng Dong , Bowen He , Moyang Guo , Ethan X. Fang , Zhuoran Yang , Vahid Tarokh

Explicit engineering of reward functions for given environments has been a major hindrance to reinforcement learning methods. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a solution to recover reward functions from demonstrations only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 David Venuto , Jhelum Chakravorty , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Gavin McCracken , Doina Precup

Bayesian inference over the reward presents an ideal solution to the ill-posed nature of the inverse reinforcement learning problem. Unfortunately current methods generally do not scale well beyond the small tabular setting due to the need…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-15 Alex J. Chan , Mihaela van der Schaar

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anish Diwan , Davide Tateo , Christopher E. Mower , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) circumvents the need for reward engineering by harnessing human preferences as the reward signal. However, current PbRL methods excessively depend on high-quality feedback from domain experts,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Jie Cheng , Gang Xiong , Xingyuan Dai , Qinghai Miao , Yisheng Lv , Fei-Yue Wang

Reinforcement learning (RL) allows an agent interacting sequentially with an environment to maximize its long-term expected return. In the distributional RL (DistrRL) paradigm, the agent goes beyond the limit of the expected value, to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Mastane Achab , Reda Alami , Yasser Abdelaziz Dahou Djilali , Kirill Fedyanin , Eric Moulines

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) faces challenges in evaluating policy trajectories within intricate game tasks due to the difficulty in designing comprehensive and precise reward functions. This inherent difficulty curtails the broader…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Zichao Shen , Tianchen Zhu , Qingyun Sun , Shiqi Gao , Jianxin Li

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a powerful paradigm to avoid meticulous reward engineering by learning rewards based on human preferences. However, real-time human feedback is hard to obtain in online tasks. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Songjun Tu , Jingbo Sun , Qichao Zhang , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongbin Zhao

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has emerged as a promising approach for learning behaviors from human feedback without predefined reward functions. However, current PbRL methods face a critical challenge in effectively…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Brahim Driss , Alex Davey , Riad Akrour

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to reconstruct the reward function from expert demonstrations to facilitate policy learning, and has demonstrated its remarkable success in imitation learning. To promote expert-like behavior,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Shunyu Liu , Yunpeng Qing , Shuqi Xu , Hongyan Wu , Jiangtao Zhang , Jingyuan Cong , Tianhao Chen , Yunfu Liu , Mingli Song

Reinforcement Learning (RL) struggles in problems with delayed rewards, and one approach is to segment the task into sub-tasks with incremental rewards. We propose a framework called Hierarchical Inverse Reinforcement Learning (HIRL), which…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-04-25 Sanjay Krishnan , Animesh Garg , Richard Liaw , Lauren Miller , Florian T. Pokorny , Ken Goldberg