Preference-based feedback is important for many applications in reinforcement learning where direct evaluation of a reward function is not feasible. A notable recent example arises in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) on large language models. For many applications of RLHF, the cost of acquiring the human feedback can be substantial. In this work, we take advantage of the fact that one can often choose contexts at which to obtain human feedback in order to most efficiently identify a good policy, and formalize this as an offline contextual dueling bandit problem. We give an upper-confidence-bound style algorithm for this problem and prove a polynomial worst-case regret bound. We then provide empirical confirmation in a synthetic setting that our approach outperforms existing methods. After, we extend the setting and methodology for practical use in RLHF training of large language models. Here, our method is able to reach better performance with fewer samples of human preferences than multiple baselines on three real-world datasets.

利用基于偏好的反馈为增强学习中的许多应用程序提供重要支持，本研究通过离线情境决斗机制问题的算法和多项式最坏情况遗憾边界，提供了一种在人类反馈训练大型语言模型中有效识别良好策略的方法，并在三个实际数据集上通过较少的人类偏好样本取得更好的性能。

基于主动探索的样本有效强化学习来自人类反馈