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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

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

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) methods provide a solution to avoid reward engineering by learning reward models based on human preferences. However, poor feedback- and sample- efficiency still remain the problems that hinder…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Hexian Ni , Tao Lu , Haoyuan Hu , Yinghao Cai , Shuo Wang

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) can enable robots to learn to perform tasks based on an individual's preferences without requiring a hand-crafted reward function. However, existing approaches either assume access to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Yi Liu , Gaurav Datta , Ellen Novoseller , Daniel S. Brown

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

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

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) bypasses explicit reward engineering by inferring reward functions from human preference comparisons, enabling better alignment with human intentions. However, humans often struggle to label a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Ni Mu , Hao Hu , Xiao Hu , Yiqin Yang , Bo Xu , Qing-Shan Jia

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PBRL) in the offline setting has succeeded greatly in industrial applications such as chatbots. A two-step learning framework where one applies a reinforcement learning step after a reward modeling…

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

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

Offline Reinforcement Learning (ORL) enablesus to separately study the two interlinked processes of reinforcement learning: collecting informative experience and inferring optimal behaviour. The second step has been widely studied in the…

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

Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) has shown impressive capabilities in training agents without reward engineering. However, a notable limitation of PbRL is its dependency on substantial human feedback. This dependency stems…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Fengshuo Bai , Rui Zhao , Hongming Zhang , Sijia Cui , Ying Wen , Yaodong Yang , Bo Xu , Lei Han

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Shengjie Sun , Jiafei Lyu , Runze Liu , Mengbei Yan , Bo Liu , Deheng Ye , Xiu Li

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

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

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

Offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) typically operates in two phases: first, use human preferences to learn a reward model and annotate rewards for a reward-free offline dataset; second, learn a policy by optimizing the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Songjun Tu , Jingbo Sun , Qichao Zhang , Yaocheng Zhang , Jia Liu , Ke Chen , Dongbin Zhao

Preference based Reinforcement Learning (PbRL) removes the need to hand specify a reward function by learning a reward from preference feedback over policy behaviors. Current approaches to PbRL do not address the credit assignment problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-16 Mudit Verma , Katherine Metcalf