arXiv AI By Chenyang Cao, Miguel Rogel-Garc\'ia, Mohamed Nabail, Xueqian Wang, Nicholas Rhinehart

Residual Reward Models: Leveraging Prior Knowledge for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning in Robotics

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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.

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