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Kernelized Offline Contextual Dueling Bandits
Viraj Mehta · Ojash Neopane · Vikramjeet Das · Sen Lin · Jeff Schneider · Willie Neiswanger

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in The Many Facets of Preference-Based Learning »
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=yHcwptiJta »

Preference-based feedback is important for many applications where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback on large language models. For many of these applications, the cost of acquiring the human feedback can be substantial or even prohibitive. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that often the agent can choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback in order to most efficiently identify a good policy, and introduce the offline contextual dueling bandit setting. We give an upper-confidence-bound style algorithm for this setting and prove a regret bound. We also give empirical confirmation that this method outperforms a similar strategy that uses uniformly sampled contexts.

Author Information

Viraj Mehta (Carnegie Mellon University)
Ojash Neopane (Carnegie Mellon University)
Vikramjeet Das (Carnegie Mellon University)
Sen Lin (Stanford University)
Jeff Schneider (CMU)
Willie Neiswanger (Stanford University)

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