arXiv:2510.15728cs.LGcs.AI2025-10

用自动机生成偏好替代人工设计奖励,让强化学习更好处理时间依赖任务。

RLAF: Reinforcement Learning from Automaton Feedback

  • 用确定性有限自动机结构生成轨迹偏好,间接学习奖励函数。
  • 在离散和连续环境中均优于传统方法,实现近最优策略。
  • 适合需要复杂时序逻辑、避免人工调奖的场景。

在具有复杂历史依赖奖励结构的环境中,传统强化学习方法面临重大挑战。本文提出一种新方法,利用基于自动机的反馈引导学习过程,将显式奖励函数替换为源自确定性有限自动机(DFA)的偏好。与直接用自动机定义奖励的传统方法不同,本方法通过DFA结构生成轨迹偏好,用于学习奖励函数,从而无需手动设计奖励。框架包含静态和动态两种策略:静态方法直接使用学习到的奖励优化策略;动态方法通过迭代更新奖励函数与策略直至收敛。实验在离散与连续环境中验证了该方法能有效学习具有时间依赖性的任务策略,性能超越传统奖励工程及基于自动机的基线方法(如奖励机器、LTL引导方法)。结果表明,基于自动机的偏好在处理非马尔可夫奖励方面具有优势,提供了一种可扩展、高效且无需人工干预的奖励建模替代方案。此外,我们提供了收敛性保证,在标准假设下,该自动机引导的偏好学习框架能学到相对于真实非马尔可夫目标近最优的策略。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) in environments with complex, history-dependent reward structures poses significant challenges for traditional methods. In this work, we introduce a novel approach that leverages automaton-based feedback to guide the learning process, replacing explicit reward functions with preferences derived from a deterministic finite automaton (DFA). Unlike conventional approaches that use automata for direct reward specification, our method employs the structure of the DFA to generate preferences over trajectories that are used to learn a reward function, eliminating the need for manual reward engineering. Our framework introduces a static approach that uses the learned reward function directly for policy optimization and a dynamic approach that involves continuous refining of the reward function and policy through iterative updates until convergence. Our experiments in both discrete and continuous environments demonstrate that our approach enables the RL agent to learn effective policies for tasks with temporal dependencies, outperforming traditional reward engineering and automaton-based baselines such as reward machines and LTL-guided methods. Our results highlight the advantages of automaton-based preferences in handling non-Markovian rewards, offering a scalable, efficient, and human-independent alternative to traditional reward modeling. We also provide a convergence guarantee showing that under standard assumptions our automaton-guided preference-based framework learns a policy that is near-optimal with respect to the true non-Markovian objective.

强化学习自动机偏好学习时序任务

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