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Related papers: Causally Robust Reward Learning from Reason-Augmen…

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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…

Reward models are central to aligning large language models, yet they often overfit to spurious cues such as response length and overly agreeable tone. Most prior work weakens these cues directly by penalizing or controlling specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yunsheng Lu , Zijiang Yang , Licheng Pan , Zhixuan Chu

Robots must learn from both what people do and what they say, but either modality alone is often incomplete: physical corrections are grounded but ambiguous in intent, while language expresses high-level goals but lacks physical grounding.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jordan Abi Nader , David Lee , Nathaniel Dennler , Andreea Bobu

Despite the success of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) in aligning language models, current reward modeling heavily relies on experimental feedback data collected from human annotators under controlled and costly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Hao Wang , Licheng Pan , Zhichao Chen , Chunyuan Zheng , Zhixuan Chu , Xiaoxi Li , Yuan Lu , Xinggao Liu , Haoxuan Li , Zhouchen Lin

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

As a robot's operational environment and tasks to perform within it grow in complexity, the explicit specification and balancing of optimization objectives to achieve a preferred behavior profile moves increasingly farther out of reach.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Yi-Shiuan Tung , Gyanig Kumar , Wei Jiang , Bradley Hayes , Alessandro Roncone

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) aligns a robot behavior with human preferences via a reward function learned from binary feedback over agent behaviors. We show that dynamics-aware reward functions improve the sample…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Katherine Metcalf , Miguel Sarabia , Natalie Mackraz , Barry-John Theobald

When operating in service of people, robots need to optimize rewards aligned with end-user preferences. Since robots will rely on raw perceptual inputs like RGB images, their rewards will inevitably use visual representations. Recently…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Ran Tian , Chenfeng Xu , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Jitendra Malik , Andrea Bajcsy

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

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Anukriti Singh , Amisha Bhaskar , Peihong Yu , Souradip Chakraborty , Ruthwik Dasyam , Amrit Bedi , Pratap Tokekar

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a powerful approach for aligning generative models, but its reliance on learned reward models makes it vulnerable to mis-specification and reward hacking. Preference-based…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Akhil Agnihotri , Rahul Jain , Deepak Ramachandran , Zheng Wen

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant progress in performing complex tasks. While Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been effective in aligning LLMs with human preferences, it is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Chaoqi Wang , Zhuokai Zhao , Yibo Jiang , Zhaorun Chen , Chen Zhu , Yuxin Chen , Jiayi Liu , Lizhu Zhang , Xiangjun Fan , Hao Ma , Sinong Wang

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

Single-task RL agents are typically trained under a fixed reward function, which limits their robustness to reward misspecification and their ability to adapt to changing preferences. We introduce Reward-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Michal Nauman , Marek Cygan , Pieter Abbeel

Human-designed reward functions for reinforcement learning (RL) agents are frequently misaligned with the humans' true, unobservable objectives, and thus act only as proxies. Optimizing for a misspecified proxy reward function often induces…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Stephane Hatgis-Kessell , Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty , Emma Brunskill

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) provides a natural way to align RL agents' behavior with human desired outcomes, but is often restrained by costly human feedback. To improve feedback efficiency, most existing PbRL methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-08 Xiao Hu , Jianxiong Li , Xianyuan Zhan , Qing-Shan Jia , Ya-Qin Zhang

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents often requires meticulous reward engineering. Preference-based RL methods are able to learn a more flexible reward model based on human preferences by actively incorporating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Xinran Liang , Katherine Shu , Kimin Lee , Pieter Abbeel

Reward models (RMs) are fundamental to aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) via human feedback, yet they often suffer from reward hacking. They tend to latch on to superficial or spurious attributes, such as response length or formatting,…

In practice, rigorous reasoning is often a key driver of correct code, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation often neglects optimizing reasoning quality. Bringing process-level supervision into RL is appealing, but it faces…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Lishui Fan , Yu Zhang , Mouxiang Chen , Zhongxin Liu