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We consider the problem of reward learning for temporally extended tasks. For reward learning, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a widely used paradigm. Given a Markov decision process (MDP) and a set of demonstrations for a task, IRL…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-07-14 Farzan Memarian , Zhe Xu , Bo Wu , Min Wen , Ufuk Topcu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Anish Diwan , Davide Tateo , Christopher E. Mower , Haitham Bou-Ammar , Jan Peters , Oleg Arenz

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

We consider a setting for Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) where the learner is extended with the ability to actively select multiple environments, observing an agent's behavior on each environment. We first demonstrate that if the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-01-26 Kareem Amin , Satinder Singh

The problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is relevant to a variety of tasks including value alignment and robot learning from demonstration. Despite significant algorithmic contributions in recent years, IRL remains an ill-posed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Sreejith Balakrishnan , Quoc Phong Nguyen , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Harold Soh

In robotic systems, the performance of reinforcement learning depends on the rationality of predefined reward functions. However, manually designed reward functions often lead to policy failures due to inaccuracies. Inverse Reinforcement…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Yongkai Tian , Yirong Qi , Xin Yu , Wenjun Wu , Jie Luo

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) learns a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstration data of an expert. However, in the current IRL setting, the learner is isolated from the expert and can only passively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yue Mao , Shicheng Liu , Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Multi-task Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring multiple reward functions from expert demonstrations. Prior work, built on Bayesian IRL, is unable to scale to complex environments due to computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-17 Adam Gleave , Oliver Habryka

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the task of finding a reward function that generates a desired optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process (MDP). This paper develops an information-theoretic lower bound for the sample…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

This paper develops an inverse reinforcement learning algorithm aimed at recovering a reward function from the observed actions of an agent. We introduce a strategy to flexibly handle different types of actions with two approximations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-26 Kun Li , Yanan Sui , Joel W. Burdick

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) enables an agent to learn complex behavior by observing demonstrations from a (near-)optimal policy. The typical assumption is that the learner's goal is to match the teacher's demonstrated behavior. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-30 Sebastian Tschiatschek , Ahana Ghosh , Luis Haug , Rati Devidze , Adish Singla

Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

We introduce inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as an effective paradigm for training abstractive summarization models, imitating human summarization behaviors. Our IRL model estimates the reward function using a suite of important…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Yu Fu , Deyi Xiong , Yue Dong

Reinforcement learning agents are prone to undesired behaviors due to reward mis-specification. Finding a set of reward functions to properly guide agent behaviors is particularly challenging in multi-agent scenarios. Inverse reinforcement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Lantao Yu , Jiaming Song , Stefano Ermon

We provide an original theoretical study of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) through the lens of reward compatibility, a novel framework to quantify the compatibility of a reward with the given expert's demonstrations. Intuitively, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Metelli

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), which infers reward functions from demonstrations, is a valuable tool for modeling and understanding decision-making behavior. Many variants of IRL have been developed to capture complexities of human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Leo Benac , Abhishek Sharma , Alihan Huyuk , Finale Doshi-Velez

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) algorithms infer a reward function that explains demonstrations provided by an expert acting in the environment. Maximum Causal Entropy (MCE) IRL is currently the most popular formulation of IRL, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Adam Gleave , Sam Toyer

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods assume that the expert data is generated by an agent optimizing some reward function. However, in many settings, the agent may optimize a reward function subject to some constraints, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Ashish Gaurav , Kasra Rezaee , Guiliang Liu , Pascal Poupart