Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Hussonnois, Maxence, Karimpanal, Thommen George, Rana, Santu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24127
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918469564366848
author Hussonnois, Maxence
Karimpanal, Thommen George
Rana, Santu
author_facet Hussonnois, Maxence
Karimpanal, Thommen George
Rana, Santu
contents Unsupervised skill discovery in reinforcement learning aims to intrinsically motivate agents to discover diverse and useful behaviours. However, unconstrained approaches can produce unsafe, unethical, or misaligned behaviours. To mitigate these risks and improve the practical desireability of discovered skills, recent work grounds the discovery process by leveraging human preference feedback. However, preference-based approaches are feedback-inefficient and inherently ill-equipped to deal with skill spaces composed of a variety of different skills such as running, jumping, walking, etc. To overcome this limitation, we introduce semantic labelling, a novel and feedback-efficient approach that leverages human cognitive strengths to identify and label semantically meaningful behaviours. Based on semantic labelling, we propose Semantically Relevant Skill Discovery (SRSD), a novel human-in-the-loop approach that collects semantic labels from human feedback and learns a reward function to encourage skills to be more semantically diverse and relevant. Through our experiments in a 2D navigation environment and four locomotion environments, we demonstrate that SRSD can improve semantic diversity and discover relevant behaviours while scaling effectively to a large variety of behaviours.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_24127
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Human Feedback for Semantically-Relevant Skill Discovery
Hussonnois, Maxence
Karimpanal, Thommen George
Rana, Santu
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Unsupervised skill discovery in reinforcement learning aims to intrinsically motivate agents to discover diverse and useful behaviours. However, unconstrained approaches can produce unsafe, unethical, or misaligned behaviours. To mitigate these risks and improve the practical desireability of discovered skills, recent work grounds the discovery process by leveraging human preference feedback. However, preference-based approaches are feedback-inefficient and inherently ill-equipped to deal with skill spaces composed of a variety of different skills such as running, jumping, walking, etc. To overcome this limitation, we introduce semantic labelling, a novel and feedback-efficient approach that leverages human cognitive strengths to identify and label semantically meaningful behaviours. Based on semantic labelling, we propose Semantically Relevant Skill Discovery (SRSD), a novel human-in-the-loop approach that collects semantic labels from human feedback and learns a reward function to encourage skills to be more semantically diverse and relevant. Through our experiments in a 2D navigation environment and four locomotion environments, we demonstrate that SRSD can improve semantic diversity and discover relevant behaviours while scaling effectively to a large variety of behaviours.
title Leveraging Human Feedback for Semantically-Relevant Skill Discovery
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.24127