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As generative agents become increasingly capable, alignment of their behavior with complex human values remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches often simplify human intent through reduction to a scalar reward, overlooking the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Kalyan Cherukuri , Aarav Lala

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

Teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason during post-training typically relies on reinforcement learning with explicit outcome- or process-based reward functions. However, in many real-world settings, obtaining or defining such…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Claudio Fanconi , Nicolás Astorga , Mihaela van der Schaar

Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Smitha Milli , Pieter Abbeel , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), the central objective is to infer underlying reward functions from observed expert behaviors in a way that not only explains the given data but also generalizes to unseen scenarios. This ensures…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Ali Baheri

The inverse reinforcement learning approach to imitation learning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can enable learning from a smaller number of expert demonstrations with more robustness to error compounding than behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Juntao Ren , Gokul Swamy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking. In LLM reasoning, existing works also explore various solutions for learning effective process…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Xian Wu , Kaijie Zhu , Ying Zhang , Lun Wang , Wenbo Guo

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

Humans are masters at quickly learning many complex tasks, relying on an approximate understanding of the dynamics of their environments. In much the same way, we would like our learning agents to quickly adapt to new tasks. In this paper,…

How well do reward functions learned with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) generalize? We illustrate that state-of-the-art IRL algorithms, which maximize a maximum-entropy objective, learn rewards that overfit to the demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Andrew Szot , Amy Zhang , Dhruv Batra , Zsolt Kira , Franziska Meier

In this paper, we study an inverse reinforcement learning problem that involves learning the reward function of a learning agent using trajectory data collected while this agent is learning its optimal policy. To address this problem, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Kavinayan P. Sivakumar , Yi Shen , Zachary Bell , Scott Nivison , Boyuan Chen , Michael M. Zavlanos

An inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) agent learns to act intelligently by observing expert demonstrations and learning the expert's underlying reward function. Although learning the reward functions from demonstrations has achieved great…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Wei Gao , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Multi-task reinforcement learning (RL) aims to simultaneously learn policies for solving many tasks. Several prior works have found that relabeling past experience with different reward functions can improve sample efficiency. Relabeling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-26 Benjamin Eysenbach , Xinyang Geng , Sergey Levine , Ruslan Salakhutdinov

In this paper, we formulate inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) as an expert-learner interaction whereby the optimal performance intent of an expert or target agent is unknown to a learner agent. The learner observes the states and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-06 Wenqian Xue , Bosen Lian , Jialu Fan , Tianyou Chai , Frank L. Lewis

We consider the problem of recovering an expert's reward function with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) when there are missing/incomplete state-action pairs or observations in the demonstrated trajectories. This issue of missing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-19 Tien Mai , Quoc Phong Nguyen , Kian Hsiang Low , Patrick Jaillet

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function from expert demonstrations. Recently, Optimal Transport (OT) methods have been successfully deployed to align trajectories and infer rewards. While OT-based methods have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Zixuan Dong , Yumi Omori , Keith Ross

Designing suitable reward functions for numerous interacting intelligent agents is challenging in real-world applications. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) in mean field games (MFGs) offers a practical framework to infer reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Yang Chen , Xiao Lin , Bo Yan , Libo Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Neset Özkan Tan , Michael Witbrock

In the context of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with a single expert, adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (AIRL) serves as a foundational approach to providing comprehensive and transferable task descriptions. However, AIRL…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-12-31 Yangchun Zhang , Wang Zhou , Yirui Zhou

Imitation learning (IL) is a framework that learns to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations. Recently, IL shows promising results on high dimensional and control tasks. However, IL typically suffers from sample inefficiency in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Lihua Zhang

In aims to uncover insights into medical decision-making embedded within observational data from clinical settings, we present a novel application of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that identifies suboptimal clinician actions based on…