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Reinforcement Learning from Diverse Human Preferences

Wanqi Xue, Bo An, Shuicheng Yan, Zhongwen Xu

IJCAI 2024 Conference

August 2024

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Human Preferences, Human Feedback, Rewards

Abstract:

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 paradigm called reinforcement learning from human preferences (or preference-based RL) has emerged as a promising solution, in which reward functions are learned from human preference labels among behavior trajectories. However, existing methods for preference-based RL are limited by the need for accurate oracle preference labels. This paper addresses this limitation by developing a method for crowd-sourcing preference labels and learning from diverse human preferences. The key idea is to stabilize reward learning through regularization and correction in a latent space. To ensure temporal consistency, a strong constraint is imposed on the reward model that forces its latent space to be close to the prior distribution. Additionally, a confidence-based reward model ensembling method is designed to generate more stable and reliable predictions. The proposed method is tested on a variety of tasks in DMcontrol and Meta-world and has shown consistent and significant improvements over existing preference-based RL algorithms when learning from diverse feedback, paving the way for real-world applications of RL methods.

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