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Reinforcement learning (RL) with sparse and deceptive rewards is challenging because non-zero rewards are rarely obtained. Hence, the gradient calculated by the agent can be stochastic and without valid information. Recent studies that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Guojian Wang , Faguo Wu , Xiao Zhang , Jianxiang Liu

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

Risky and crowded environments (RCE) contain abstract sources of risk and uncertainty, which are perceived differently by humans, leading to a variety of behaviors. Thus, robots deployed in RCEs, need to exhibit diverse perception and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-03-16 Aamodh Suresh , Angelique Taylor , Laurel D. Riek , Sonia Martinez

A key challenge in reward learning from human input is that desired agent behavior often changes based on context. For example, a robot must adapt to avoid a stove once it becomes hot. We observe that while high-level preferences (e.g.,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Alexandra Forsey-Smerek , Julie Shah , Andreea Bobu

Robots often need to learn the human's reward function online, during the current interaction. This real-time learning requires fast but approximate learning rules: when the human's behavior is noisy or suboptimal, current approximations…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-05 Shaunak A. Mehta , Forrest Meng , Andrea Bajcsy , Dylan P. Losey

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

In this paper, we investigate the problem of offline Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) with human feedback where feedback is available in the form of preference between trajectory pairs rather than explicit rewards. Our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Wenhao Zhan , Masatoshi Uehara , Nathan Kallus , Jason D. Lee , Wen Sun

Applying reinforcement learning (RL) to real-world problems is often made challenging by the inability to interact with the environment and the difficulty of designing reward functions. Offline RL addresses the first challenge by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Alizée Pace , Bernhard Schölkopf , Gunnar Rätsch , Giorgia Ramponi

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can help avoid sophisticated reward designs and align better with human intentions, showing great promise in various real-world applications. However, obtaining human feedback for preferences…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiqin Yang , Hao Hu , Yihuan Mao , Jin Zhang , Chengjie Wu , Yuhua Jiang , Xu Yang , Runpeng Xie , Yi Fan , Bo Liu , Yang Gao , Bo Xu , Chongjie Zhang

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

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous, aligning their decision-making to human preferences is essential. In domains like autonomous driving or robotics, it is impossible to write down the reward function representing these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Ondrej Bajgar , Sid William Gould , Rohan Narayan Langford Mitta , Jonathon Liu , Oliver Newcombe , Jack Golden

Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning allows the training of agents through various interfaces, even for non-expert humans. Recently, preference-based methods (PbRL), where the human has to give his preference over two trajectories,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Jakob Karalus

Preference-based learning aims to align robot task objectives with human values. One of the most common methods to infer human preferences is by pairwise comparisons of robot task trajectories. Traditional comparison-based preference…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Hanfang Lyu , Yuanchen Bai , Xin Liang , Ujaan Das , Chuhan Shi , Leiliang Gong , Yingchi Li , Mingfei Sun , Ming Ge , Xiaojuan Ma

Ensuring AI models align with human values is essential for their safety and functionality. Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) leverages human preferences to achieve this alignment. However, when preferences are sourced from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Ryan Bahlous-Boldi , Li Ding , Lee Spector , Scott Niekum

To design rewards that align with human goals, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a prominent technique for learning reward functions from human preferences and optimizing policies via reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 Taehyun Cho , Seokhun Ju , Seungyub Han , Dohyeong Kim , Kyungjae Lee , Jungwoo Lee

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…

Learning a reward function from human preferences is challenging as it typically requires having a high-fidelity simulator or using expensive and potentially unsafe actual physical rollouts in the environment. However, in many tasks the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Daniel Shin , Anca D. Dragan , Daniel S. Brown

While reinforcement learning (RL) has become a more popular approach for robotics, designing sufficiently informative reward functions for complex tasks has proven to be extremely difficult due their inability to capture human intent and…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-12-08 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

Controlled automated story generation seeks to generate natural language stories satisfying constraints from natural language critiques or preferences. Existing methods to control for story preference utilize prompt engineering which is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-12-16 Louis Castricato , Alexander Havrilla , Shahbuland Matiana , Michael Pieler , Anbang Ye , Ian Yang , Spencer Frazier , Mark Riedl

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) are designed to suggest the target item that the user is likely to prefer through multi-turn conversations. Recent studies stress that capturing sentiments in user conversations improves…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Heejin Kook , Junyoung Kim , Seongmin Park , Jongwuk Lee