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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

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

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering a task description given a demonstration of the optimal policy used to solve such a task. The optimal policy is usually provided by an expert or teacher, making IRL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-02-09 Héctor Ratia , Luis Montesano , Ruben Martinez-Cantin

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring a reward function from expert behavior. There are several approaches to IRL, but most are designed to learn a Markovian reward. However, a reward function might be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Noah Topper , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is used to infer the reward function from the actions of an expert running a Markov Decision Process (MDP). A novel approach using variational inference for learning the reward function is proposed in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-03 Arpan Kusari

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of learning the preferences of an agent from the observations of its behavior on a task. While this problem has been well investigated, the related problem of {\em online} IRL---where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Saurabh Arora , Prashant Doshi , Bikramjit Banerjee

Acquiring complex behaviors is essential for artificially intelligent agents, yet learning these behaviors in high-dimensional settings poses a significant challenge due to the vast search space. Traditional reinforcement learning (RL)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Mert Albaba , Sammy Christen , Thomas Langarek , Christoph Gebhardt , Otmar Hilliges , Michael J. Black

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 this paper, we study the problem of obtaining a control policy that can mimic and then outperform expert demonstrations in Markov decision processes where the reward function is unknown to the learning agent. One main relevant approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Feng Tao , Yongcan Cao

While Reinforcement Learning (RL) aims to train an agent from a reward function in a given environment, Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to recover the reward function from observing an expert's behavior. It is well known that, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Paul Rolland , Luca Viano , Norman Schuerhoff , Boris Nikolov , Volkan Cevher

Many manipulation tasks require robots to interact with unknown environments. In such applications, the ability to adapt the impedance according to different task phases and environment constraints is crucial for safety and performance.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-16 Xiang Zhang , Liting Sun , Zhian Kuang , Masayoshi Tomizuka

Our goal is for agents to optimize the right reward function, despite how difficult it is for us to specify what that is. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) enables us to infer reward functions from demonstrations, but it usually assumes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Rohin Shah , Noah Gundotra , Pieter Abbeel , Anca D. Dragan

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to learn the reward function from expert trajectories, to understand the task for imitation or collaboration thereby removing the need for manual reward engineering. However, IRL in the context of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Yikang Gui , Prashant Doshi

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

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

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

In this work, we study an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem where the experts are planning under a shared reward function but with different, unknown planning horizons. Without the knowledge of discount factors, the reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-27 Jiayu Yao , Weiwei Pan , Finale Doshi-Velez , Barbara E Engelhardt