用偏好反馈替代奖励信号,实现无需奖励的上下文强化学习。
Learning in Context, Guided by Choice: A Reward-Free Paradigm for Reinforcement Learning with Transformers
- 基于偏好反馈构建上下文强化学习框架,无需显式奖励信号。
- 在多个任务上表现接近带奖励训练的方法,实现强泛化能力。
- 适合奖励难定义或获取成本高的复杂决策场景。
上下文强化学习(ICRL)利用变压器模型(TMs)的上下文学习能力,在不更新参数的情况下高效泛化到未见过的序列决策任务。然而,现有ICRL方法依赖预训练中的显式奖励信号,当奖励模糊、难以指定或获取成本高时,适用性受限。为此,本文提出一种新范式——基于偏好的上下文强化学习(ICPRL),其预训练与部署均仅依赖偏好反馈,无需奖励监督。研究了两种反馈粒度不同的变体:每步偏好反馈的I-PRL和轨迹级比较的T-PRL。结果表明,即使仅使用偏好数据集,监督预训练仍有效,验证了纯偏好信号下实现上下文强化学习的可行性。为进一步提升数据效率,引入直接从偏好数据优化模型策略的原生偏好框架,无需奖励信号或最优动作标签。在双人赌博机、导航和连续控制任务上的实验显示,ICPRL能实现对未见任务的强大上下文泛化,性能媲美经完整奖励监督训练的ICRL方法。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) leverages the in-context learning capabilities of transformer models (TMs) to efficiently generalize to unseen sequential decision-making tasks without parameter updates. However, existing ICRL methods rely on explicit reward signals during pretraining, which limits their applicability when rewards are ambiguous, hard to specify, or costly to obtain. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new learning paradigm, In-Context Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (ICPRL), in which both pretraining and deployment rely solely on preference feedback, eliminating the need for reward supervision. We study two variants that differ in the granularity of feedback: Immediate Preference-based RL (I-PRL) with per-step preferences, and Trajectory Preference-based RL (T-PRL) with trajectory-level comparisons. We first show that supervised pretraining, a standard approach in ICRL, remains effective under preference-only context datasets, demonstrating the feasibility of in-context reinforcement learning using only preference signals. To further improve data efficiency, we introduce alternative preference-native frameworks for I-PRL and T-PRL that directly optimize TM policies from preference data without requiring reward signals nor optimal action labels.Experiments on dueling bandits, navigation, and continuous control tasks demonstrate that ICPRL enables strong in-context generalization to unseen tasks, achieving performance comparable to ICRL methods trained with full reward supervision.
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