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We tackle the problem of policy learning from expert demonstrations without a reward function. A central challenge in this space is that these policies fail upon deployment due to issues of distributional shift, environment stochasticity,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-19 Victor Kolev , Rafael Rafailov , Kyle Hatch , Jiajun Wu , Chelsea Finn

While reinforcement learning algorithms provide automated acquisition of optimal policies, practical application of such methods requires a number of design decisions, such as manually designing reward functions that not only define the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Tim G. J. Rudner , Vitchyr H. Pong , Rowan McAllister , Yarin Gal , Sergey Levine

Although reinforcement learning has seen tremendous success recently, this kind of trial-and-error learning can be impractical or inefficient in complex environments. The use of demonstrations, on the other hand, enables agents to benefit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Tongzhou Mu , Hao Su

A significant challenge for the practical application of reinforcement learning in the real world is the need to specify an oracle reward function that correctly defines a task. Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to avoid this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Kelvin Xu , Ellis Ratner , Anca Dragan , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

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

Given a set of trajectories demonstrating the execution of a task safely in a constrained MDP with observable rewards but with unknown constraints and non-observable costs, we aim to find a policy that maximizes the likelihood of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-02 George Papadopoulos , George A. Vouros

Active learning from demonstration allows a robot to query a human for specific types of input to achieve efficient learning. Existing work has explored a variety of active query strategies; however, to our knowledge, none of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-05 Daniel S. Brown , Yuchen Cui , Scott Niekum

This work handles the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem where only a small number of demonstrations are available from a demonstrator for each high-dimensional task, insufficient to estimate an accurate reward function. Observing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-10-16 Kun Li , Joel W. Burdick

Automating robotic surgery via learning from demonstration (LfD) techniques is extremely challenging. This is because surgical tasks often involve sequential decision-making processes with complex interactions of physical objects and have…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Zohre Karimi , Shing-Hei Ho , Bao Thach , Alan Kuntz , Daniel S. Brown

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

Complex planning and scheduling problems have long been solved using various optimization or heuristic approaches. In recent years, imitation learning that aims to learn from expert demonstrations has been proposed as a viable alternative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Qian Shao , Pradeep Varakantham , Shih-Fen Cheng

We study inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and imitation learning (IM), the problems of recovering a reward or policy function from expert's demonstrated trajectories. We propose a new way to improve the learning process by adding a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

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

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

One typical assumption in inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is that human experts act to optimize the expected utility of a stochastic cost with a fixed distribution. This assumption deviates from actual human behaviors under ambiguity.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-25 Rui Chen , Wenshuo Wang , Zirui Zhao , Ding Zhao

Learning high-performance control policies that remain consistent with expert behavior is a fundamental challenge in robotics. Reinforcement learning can discover high-performing strategies but often departs from desirable human behavior,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Siwei Ju , Jan Tauberschmidt , Oleg Arenz , Peter van Vliet , Jan Peters

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer an agent's preferences (represented as a reward function $R$) from their behaviour (represented as a policy $\pi$). To do this, we need a behavioural model of how $\pi$ relates to $R$. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-12 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

Imitation learning often assumes that demonstrations are close to optimal according to some fixed, but unknown, cost function. However, according to satisficing theory, humans often choose acceptable behavior based on their personal (and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Rushit N. Shah , Nikolaos Agadakos , Synthia Sasulski , Ali Farajzadeh , Sanjiban Choudhury , Brian Ziebart

Learning models that are robust to distribution shifts is a key concern in the context of their real-life applicability. Invariant Risk Minimization (IRM) is a popular framework that aims to learn robust models from multiple environments.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Moulik Choraria , Ibtihal Ferwana , Ankur Mani , Lav R. Varshney

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning under safety requirements, in which an agent is trained to complete a given task, typically formalized as the maximization of a reward signal over time, while concurrently avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Tu-Hoa Pham , Giovanni De Magistris , Don Joven Agravante , Subhajit Chaudhury , Asim Munawar , Ryuki Tachibana