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Preference-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for aligning policies with human intent but is often constrained by the high cost of human feedback. In this work, we introduce PrefVLM, a framework that integrates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Udita Ghosh , Dripta S. Raychaudhuri , Jiachen Li , Konstantinos Karydis , Amit Roy-Chowdhury

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 (RL) provides a framework to train AI agents using human feedback through preferences over pairs of behaviors, enabling agents to learn desired behaviors when it is difficult to specify a numerical…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-03-21 David Chhan , Ellen Novoseller , Vernon J. Lawhern

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

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

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) promises to learn a complex reward function with binary human preference. However, such human-in-the-loop formulation requires considerable human effort to assign preference labels to segment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-20 Yachen Kang , Li He , Jinxin Liu , Zifeng Zhuang , Donglin Wang

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

Current audio captioning relies on supervised learning with paired audio-caption data, which is costly to curate and may not reflect human preferences in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose a preference-aligned audio…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-02-26 Kartik Hegde , Rehana Mahfuz , Yinyi Guo , Erik Visser

Learning human preferences in language models remains fundamentally challenging, as reward modeling relies on subtle, subjective comparisons or shades of gray rather than clear-cut labels. This study investigates the limits of current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Simona-Vasilica Oprea , Adela Bâra

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

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

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

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 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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) shows promise in aligning robot behaviors with human preferences, but its success depends heavily on the accurate modeling of human preferences through reward models. Most methods adopt…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Dezhong Zhao , Ruiqi Wang , Dayoon Suh , Taehyeon Kim , Ziqin Yuan , Byung-Cheol Min , Guohua Chen

There is a growing body of work on learning from human feedback to align various aspects of machine learning systems with human values and preferences. We consider the setting of fairness in content moderation, in which human feedback is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Emilia Agis Lerner , Florian E. Dorner , Elliott Ash , Naman Goel

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences has been recognized as the key to improving LLMs' interaction quality. However, in this pluralistic world, human preferences can be diversified due to annotators' different…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dun Zeng , Yong Dai , Pengyu Cheng , Longyue Wang , Tianhao Hu , Wanshun Chen , Nan Du , Zenglin Xu

Preference-based reinforcement learning is an effective way to handle tasks where rewards are hard to specify but can be exceedingly inefficient as preference learning is often tabula rasa. We demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Chao Yu , Qixin Tan , Hong Lu , Jiaxuan Gao , Xinting Yang , Yu Wang , Yi Wu , Eugene Vinitsky

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) entails a variety of approaches for aligning models with human intent to alleviate the burden of reward engineering. However, most previous PbRL work has not investigated the robustness to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Sara Rajaram , R. James Cotton , Fabian H. Sinz