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Inverse reinforcement learning is a paradigm motivated by the goal of learning general reward functions from demonstrated behaviours. Yet the notion of generality for learnt costs is often evaluated in terms of robustness to various spatial…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-09-15 Todor Davchev , Sarah Bechtle , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Franziska Meier

Learning from demonstrations has made great progress over the past few years. However, it is generally data hungry and task specific. In other words, it requires a large amount of data to train a decent model on a particular task, and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-29 Pin Wang , Hanhan Li , Ching-Yao Chan

Advancements in reinforcement learning have produced a variety of complex and useful intrinsic driving forces; crucially, these drivers operate under a direct conditioning paradigm. This form of conditioning limits our agents' capacity by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Rodney A Sanchez , Ferat Sahin , Alex Ororbia , Jamison Heard

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with the added twist that the learner is assisted by a helpful teacher. More formally, we tackle the following algorithmic question: How could a teacher provide an informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Rati Devidze , Volkan Cevher , Adish Singla

This paper addresses the problem of learning a task from demonstration. We adopt the framework of inverse reinforcement learning, where tasks are represented in the form of a reward function. Our contribution is a novel active learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-01-24 Francisco Melo , Manuel Lopes

In this letter, we present an approach for learning in-hand manipulation skills with a low-cost, underactuated prosthetic hand in the presence of irreversible events. Our approach combines reinforcement learning based on visual perception…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Pietro Falco , Abdallah Attawia , Matteo Saveriano , Dongheui Lee

Explicit engineering of reward functions for given environments has been a major hindrance to reinforcement learning methods. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a solution to recover reward functions from demonstrations only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 David Venuto , Jhelum Chakravorty , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Gavin McCracken , Doina Precup

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-11 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

Traditional imitation learning provides a set of methods and algorithms to learn a reward function or policy from expert demonstrations. Learning from demonstration has been shown to be advantageous for navigation tasks as it allows for…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Christian Ellis , Maggie Wigness , John G. Rogers , Craig Lennon , Lance Fiondella

With multiple outcomes in empirical research, a common strategy is to define a composite outcome as a weighted average of the original outcomes. However, the choices of weights are often subjective and can be controversial. We propose an…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-09-17 Wei Zhang , Qizhai Li , Peng Ding

We introduce the Conditional Independence Regression CovariancE (CIRCE), a measure of conditional independence for multivariate continuous-valued variables. CIRCE applies as a regularizer in settings where we wish to learn neural features…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Roman Pogodin , Namrata Deka , Yazhe Li , Danica J. Sutherland , Victor Veitch , Arthur Gretton

This paper introduces a novel model-free and a partially model-free algorithm for inverse optimal control (IOC), also known as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), aimed at estimating the cost function of continuous-time nonlinear…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-03-20 Hamed Jabbari Asl , Eiji Uchibe

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques deal with the problem of deducing a reward function that explains the behavior of an expert agent who is assumed to act optimally in an underlying unknown task. In several problems of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-09 Riccardo Poiani , Gabriele Curti , Alberto Maria Metelli , Marcello Restelli

Humans generally use natural language to communicate task requirements to each other. Ideally, natural language should also be usable for communicating goals to autonomous machines (e.g., robots) to minimize friction in task specification.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-17 Li Zhou , Kevin Small

Deep reinforcement learning achieves superhuman performance in a range of video game environments, but requires that a designer manually specify a reward function. It is often easier to provide demonstrations of a target behavior than to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-26 Aaron Tucker , Adam Gleave , Stuart Russell

Bayesian inference for inverse problems involves computing expectations under posterior distributions -- e.g., posterior means, variances, or predictive quantities -- typically via Monte Carlo (MC) estimation. When the quantity of interest…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-26 Ali Siahkoohi , Hyunwoo Oh

For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Ashvin Nair , Vitchyr Pong , Murtaza Dalal , Shikhar Bahl , Steven Lin , Sergey Levine

When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-10-21 Erdem Bıyık

The concept of the value-gradient is introduced and developed in the context of reinforcement learning. It is shown that by learning the value-gradients exploration or stochastic behaviour is no longer needed to find locally optimal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2008-03-26 Michael Fairbank