Interaction-Grounded Learning for Contextual Markov Decision Processes with Personalized Feedback

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Zhang, Mengxiao, Zhang, Yuheng, Luo, Haipeng, Mineiro, Paul
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917259491934208
author Zhang, Mengxiao
Zhang, Yuheng
Luo, Haipeng
Mineiro, Paul
author_facet Zhang, Mengxiao
Zhang, Yuheng
Luo, Haipeng
Mineiro, Paul
contents In this paper, we study Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL) [Xie et al., 2021], a paradigm designed for realistic scenarios where the learner receives indirect feedback generated by an unknown mechanism, rather than explicit numerical rewards. While prior work on IGL provides efficient algorithms with provable guarantees, those results are confined to single-step settings, restricting their applicability to modern sequential decision-making systems such as multi-turn Large Language Model (LLM) deployments. To bridge this gap, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm that achieves a sublinear regret guarantee for contextual episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with personalized feedback. Technically, we extend the reward-estimator construction of Zhang et al. [2024a] from the single-step to the multi-step setting, addressing the unique challenges of decoding latent rewards under MDPs. Building on this estimator, we design an Inverse-Gap-Weighting (IGW) algorithm for policy optimization. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in learning personalized objectives from multi-turn interactions through experiments on both a synthetic episodic MDP and a real-world user booking dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_08307
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interaction-Grounded Learning for Contextual Markov Decision Processes with Personalized Feedback
Zhang, Mengxiao
Zhang, Yuheng
Luo, Haipeng
Mineiro, Paul
Machine Learning
In this paper, we study Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL) [Xie et al., 2021], a paradigm designed for realistic scenarios where the learner receives indirect feedback generated by an unknown mechanism, rather than explicit numerical rewards. While prior work on IGL provides efficient algorithms with provable guarantees, those results are confined to single-step settings, restricting their applicability to modern sequential decision-making systems such as multi-turn Large Language Model (LLM) deployments. To bridge this gap, we propose a computationally efficient algorithm that achieves a sublinear regret guarantee for contextual episodic Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with personalized feedback. Technically, we extend the reward-estimator construction of Zhang et al. [2024a] from the single-step to the multi-step setting, addressing the unique challenges of decoding latent rewards under MDPs. Building on this estimator, we design an Inverse-Gap-Weighting (IGW) algorithm for policy optimization. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in learning personalized objectives from multi-turn interactions through experiments on both a synthetic episodic MDP and a real-world user booking dataset.
title Interaction-Grounded Learning for Contextual Markov Decision Processes with Personalized Feedback
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.08307