详细信息
- 来源站点
- ArXiv CS.AI
- 作者
- Jonathan Cola\c{c}o Carr, Prakash Panangaden, Doina Precup, Benjamin Van Roy
- 文章类型
- NEWS
- 语言
- en
- 发布日期
- 2026-06-02
摘要
arXiv:2606.00367v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning problems typically define the goal as maximizing the expected value of a scalar reward function. But, pairwise preferences are often easier to specify than scalar rewards, and they express certain goals that scalar rewards cannot. Methods for reinforcement learning with pairwise preferences have thus received growing interest. Unfortunately, these methods are inefficient in problems with long time horizons, and they lack guarantees on the performance of Markov policies relative to history-dependent policies, which bridge the theory and practice of reinforcement learning. We therefore propose the \textit{Markov decision contest} as a new problem model for reinforcement learning with pairwise preferences.