arXiv:2510.18713cs.LGcs.AI2025-10NeurIPS被引 2

用多选项反馈提升强化学习采样效率,理论证明更大选择集更优。

Preference-based Reinforcement Learning beyond Pairwise Comparisons: Benefits of Multiple Options

  • 基于排列概率模型,从多个候选动作中选最优策略以减少不确定性。
  • 理论证明采样效率随选项数增加而提升,且无传统方法的指数依赖问题。
  • 适用于大模型对齐等需高效偏好学习的场景,尤其适合高维特征任务。

我们研究在线偏好强化学习(PbRL),目标是提高样本效率。尽管近期在对齐大语言模型方面取得成功,但多数现有研究仅关注成对比较。少数工作尝试使用多选项和排序反馈,但其性能保证随反馈长度增加反而恶化。为此,本文采用Plackett-Luce模型建模动作子集的排序反馈,提出M-AUPO算法,通过最大化子集中平均不确定性来选择多动作。理论上,M-AUPO的次优差距为$\tilde{O}\left( \frac{d}{T} \sqrt{ \sum_{t=1}^T \frac{1}{|S_t|}} \right)$,其中$T$为总轮数,$d$为特征维度,$|S_t|$为第$t$轮子集大小。该结果表明更大的子集直接提升性能,且避免了以往方法对未知参数范数的指数依赖。此外,我们建立了近似匹配的下界$Ω\left( \frac{d}{K \sqrt{T}} \right)$,$K$为最大子集大小。据我们所知,这是首个明确显示子集大小带来采样效率提升的排序反馈理论结果。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We study online preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) with the goal of improving sample efficiency. While a growing body of theoretical work has emerged-motivated by PbRL's recent empirical success, particularly in aligning large language models (LLMs)-most existing studies focus only on pairwise comparisons. A few recent works (Zhu et al., 2023, Mukherjee et al., 2024, Thekumparampil et al., 2024) have explored using multiple comparisons and ranking feedback, but their performance guarantees fail to improve-and can even deteriorate-as the feedback length increases, despite the richer information available. To address this gap, we adopt the Plackett-Luce (PL) model for ranking feedback over action subsets and propose M-AUPO, an algorithm that selects multiple actions by maximizing the average uncertainty within the offered subset. We prove that M-AUPO achieves a suboptimality gap of $\tilde{O}\left( \frac{d}{T} \sqrt{ \sum_{t=1}^T \frac{1}{|S_t|}} \right)$, where $T$ is the total number of rounds, $d$ is the feature dimension, and $|S_t|$ is the size of the subset at round $t$. This result shows that larger subsets directly lead to improved performance and, notably, the bound avoids the exponential dependence on the unknown parameter's norm, which was a fundamental limitation in most previous works. Moreover, we establish a near-matching lower bound of $Ω\left( \frac{d}{K \sqrt{T}} \right)$, where $K$ is the maximum subset size. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first theoretical result in PbRL with ranking feedback that explicitly shows improved sample efficiency as a function of the subset size.

强化学习偏好学习多选项理论分析

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