为多人偏好学习设计公平算法,避免少数用户被忽视。
Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

- 以每位用户的首选项为基准,评估各选项表现
- 首次量化公平性代价,理论下界为Ω(T^{2/3} min(K,D)^{1/3})
- 适合需要兼顾所有用户偏好的推荐与评估系统
从人类偏好数据中学习正成为微调大语言模型和训练强化学习智能体的重要工具。然而,在多数场景中,模型基于所有评估者的平均偏好进行训练,当偏好差异较大时,可能对少数群体不公平。本文研究双人博弈老虎机框架下的公平性问题,假设每位用户都有一个(可能不同)的柯德尔赛特胜者(即优于其他所有选项的臂)。以用户专属柯德尔赛特胜者为参照,评估各臂相对于其胜者的性能。为促进异质用户间的公平,采用经典的纳什社会福利目标,最大化用户效用乘积,从而内在惩罚不平等并防止任何单个用户被边缘化。在此框架下,我们构造了一个困难实例,建立时间跨度T、K个臂、D位用户的后悔下界为Ω(T^{2/3} min(K,D)^{1/3}),据我们所知,这是首个量化异质偏好下公平性代价的结果。随后提出公平探索-然后承诺与公平ε-贪心算法,并包含柯德尔赛特胜者识别阶段。进一步推导出其后悔上界,与下界在T上的依赖关系仅差对数因子。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $Ω(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$ε$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.
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