arXiv:2608. 02951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) for general stochastic MDPs often requires training a reward model.
arXiv:2606. 11982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) learns policies from human trajectory-level comparisons, avoiding explicit reward design and expert demonstrations.
The paper introduces Solver-Gradient Guided Reinforcement Learning (SG‑RL), a method that augments standard RL with bounded gradients from a differentiable MPC solver to adapt cost‑function weights online. SG‑RL integrates solver‑gradient guidance into PPO through actor‑update scaling, policy loss, advantage estimation, and value‑function learning, achieving comparable or superior closed‑loop performance while requiring up to 70.6% fewer samples. Experiments on two autonomous racing platforms with intentional model mismatch demonstrate that SG‑RL outperforms both RL and gradient‑based policy learning baselines and generalizes zero‑shot to unseen environments.
arXiv:2609.36393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional reinforcement learning (RL) techniques focus on maximizing expected cumulative reward, where each action assumes to take a constant unit...
The paper introduces Residual Reward Models (RRM) to enhance preference‑based reinforcement learning (PbRL) in robotics. RRMs decompose the true reward into a prior component—such as a heuristic, language‑generated, or IRL‑derived reward—and a learned residual that is trained with human preferences. Experiments on Meta‑World, DM‑Control, and a physical Franka Panda robot show that RRMs markedly improve sample efficiency and accelerate policy learning compared to standard PbRL methods.
arXiv:2602. 00781v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning in non-episodic, finite-horizon MDPs remains underexplored and is challenged by the need to estimate returns to a fixed terminal time.
arXiv:2609.21525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference-based reward shaping can guide reinforcement learning, but adding preference signals to the reward may unintentionally change the task being...
The paper introduces Reward Ensemble under Confidence (REC), a probabilistic reward learning framework for preference-based reinforcement learning that models per‑timestep reward uncertainty using an ensemble of distributional reward models. REC incorporates uncertainty into the preference loss and uses model disagreement to drive exploration, achieving 88.4% of shaped‑reward performance on acrobatic quadrotor control versus 55.2% with standard Preference PPO. The authors train policies in simulation and transfer them zero‑shot to real quadrotors, demonstrating complex acrobatic maneuvers learned solely from human preference feedback, and validate REC on a continuous‑control benchmark.
arXiv:2502.14643v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely adopted offline algorithm for preference-based reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF),...
arXiv:2606. 18531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is typically analyzed under process-level reward supervision, yet many sequential decision datasets record only trajectory-level outcomes.
arXiv:2605. 30719v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study when large language models (LLMs) can serve as effective black-box policy optimizers for reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, i.
arXiv:2606. 32027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reward design remains a central bottleneck for autonomous robot policy improvement, especially in long-horizon manipulation tasks where sparse success labels provide too little signal and binary preferences collapse many competing notions of quality into one ambiguous signal.
arXiv:2605. 14982v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We address the discounted reward setting in reinforcement learning (RL).