Offline Preference-Based Value Optimization

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission22083 Authors

Keywords: offline reinforcement learning, preference-based reinforcement learning

Abstract:

We study the problem of offline preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL), where the agent learns from pre-collected preference data by comparing trajectory pairs.
While prior work has established theoretical foundations for offline PbRL, existing algorithms face significant practical limitations: some rely on computationally intractable optimization procedures, while others suffer from unstable training and high performance variance.
To address these challenges, we propose Preference-based Value Optimization (PVO), a simple and practical algorithm that achieves both strong empirical performance and theoretical guarantees.
PVO directly optimizes the value function consistent with preference feedback by minimizing a novel \emph{value alignment loss}.
We prove that PVO attains a rate-optimal sample complexity of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-2})$, and further show that the value alignment loss is applicable not only to value-based methods but also to actor–critic algorithms.
Empirically, PVO achieves robust and stable performance across diverse continuous control benchmarks.
It consistently outperforms strong baselines, including methods without theoretical guarantees, while requiring no additional hyperparameters for preference learning.
Moreover, our ablation study demonstrates that substituting the standard TD loss with the value alignment loss substantially improves learning from preference data, confirming its effectiveness for PbRL.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 22083