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Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) replaces reward values in traditional reinforcement learning by preferences to better elicit human opinion on the target objective, especially when numerical reward values are hard to design or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Yichong Xu , Ruosong Wang , Lin F. Yang , Aarti Singh , Artur Dubrawski

This paper studies reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for aligning large language models with human preferences. While RLHF has demonstrated promising results, many algorithms are highly sensitive to misspecifications in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Erhan Xu , Kai Ye , Hongyi Zhou , Luhan Zhu , Francesco Quinzan , Chengchun Shi

We consider the problem of preference based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where, unlike traditional reinforcement learning, an agent receives feedback only in terms of a 1 bit (0/1) preference over a trajectory pair instead of absolute…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Aldo Pacchiano , Aadirupa Saha , Jonathan Lee

Paired comparison data, where users evaluate items in pairs, play a central role in ranking and preference learning tasks. While ordinal comparison data intuitively offer richer information than binary comparisons, this paper challenges…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-13 Shirong Xu , Jingnan Zhang , Junhui Wang

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) offers a promising alternative to explicit reward engineering by learning from pairwise trajectory comparisons. However, real-world preference data often comes from heterogeneous annotators…

Choice modeling has been a central topic in the study of individual preference or utility across many fields including economics, marketing, operations research, and psychology. While the vast majority of the literature on choice models has…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-22 Zhongze Cai , Hanzhao Wang , Kalyan Talluri , Xiaocheng Li

Reward models are central to aligning language models with human preferences via reinforcement learning (RL). As RL is increasingly applied to settings such as verifiable rewards and multi-objective alignment, RMs are expected to encode…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Jiwoo Hong , Shao Tang , Zhipeng Wang

We study density estimation from pairwise comparisons, motivated by expert knowledge elicitation and learning from human feedback. We relate the unobserved target density to a tempered winner density (marginal density of preferred choices),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Petrus Mikkola , Luigi Acerbi , Arto Klami

Pairwise comparison data are widely used to infer latent rankings in areas such as sports, social choice, and machine learning. The Bradley-Terry model provides a foundational probabilistic framework but inherently assumes transitive…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-01-13 Hisaya Okahara , Tomoyuki Nakagawa , Shonosuke Sugasawa

Understanding consumer preferences is essential to product design and predicting market response to these new products. Choice-based conjoint analysis is widely used to model user preferences using their choices in surveys. However,…

Pairwise learning focuses on learning tasks with pairwise loss functions, depends on pairs of training instances, and naturally fits for modeling relationships between pairs of samples. In this paper, we focus on the privacy of pairwise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Yilin Kang , Yong Liu , Jian Li , Weiping Wang

We study the problem of learning to rank from pairwise preferences, and solve a long-standing open problem that has led to development of many heuristics but no provable results for our particular problem. Given a set $V$ of $n$ elements,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2011-05-18 Nir Ailon

In practice, preference learning from human feedback depends on incomplete data with hidden context. Hidden context refers to data that affects the feedback received, but which is not represented in the data used to train a preference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Anand Siththaranjan , Cassidy Laidlaw , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

This article introduces the bpcs R package (Bayesian Paired Comparison in Stan) and the statistical models implemented in the package. This package aims to facilitate the use of Bayesian models for paired comparison data in behavioral…

Methodology · Statistics 2021-09-21 David Issa Mattos , Érika Martins Silva Ramos

We measure LLMs' output error at pairwise text comparison, noting the probability of error in their preferences. Our method does not rely on the ground truth and supports two scenarios: (i) uniform error rate regardless of the order of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Tianyi Li

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on preference modeling to align machine learning systems with human values, yet the popular approach of random pair sampling with Bradley-Terry modeling is statistically limited and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Andreas Chouliaras , Dimitris Chatzopoulos

Despite the parallel challenges that audio and text domains face in evaluating generative model outputs, preference learning remains remarkably underexplored in audio applications. Through a PRISMA-guided systematic review of approximately…

Sound · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Aaron Broukhim , Yiran Shen , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu , Nadir Weibel

A reciprocal recommendation problem is one where the goal of learning is not just to predict a user's preference towards a passive item (e.g., a book), but to recommend the targeted user on one side another user from the other side such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Fabio Vitale , Nikos Parotsidis , Claudio Gentile

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