Uncertainty-Guided Reward Labeling for Reinforcement Learning under Limited Feedback

Renhao Zhang, Shreyas Chaudhari, Bruno Castro da Silva

In reinforcement learning from limited feedback (RLLF), only a small fraction of an offline dataset can be labeled with rewards, and the central question is which samples should be labeled to learn a high-performing policy from the resulting partially labeled dataset. Prior work formalized this as a reward-selection problem by focusing on the selection stage while treating downstream policy learning as a black box, in a regime where queried rewards are not retained for reward-model training. We instead study the retained-label setting, where queried rewards can be stored and used to fit a reward model before policy learning. We bound the suboptimality of the learned policy in terms of two sources of error: one arising from offline RL on a fixed, offline dataset, and the other from uncertainty in the reward model. Since reward selection cannot change the offline dataset, the limited labeling budget must be used to strategically reduce reward uncertainty. Motivated by RLLF's observation that useful rewards tend to keep the agent on high-return trajectories, we introduce Successor-Guided Uncertainty REduction (SURE), a novel method that uses successor features to select rewards that…