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Related papers: Identifiability in inverse reinforcement learning

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Exploration in reinforcement learning is a challenging problem: in the worst case, the agent must search for high-reward states that could be hidden anywhere in the state space. Can we define a more tractable class of RL problems, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-20 Kevin Li , Abhishek Gupta , Ashwin Reddy , Vitchyr Pong , Aurick Zhou , Justin Yu , Sergey Levine

Many imitation learning (IL) algorithms use inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to infer a reward function that aligns with the demonstration. However, the inferred reward functions often fail to capture the underlying task objectives. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-03-16 Kamil Ciosek

Many real-world reinforcement learning (RL) problems necessitate learning complex, temporally extended behavior that may only receive reward signal when the behavior is completed. If the reward-worthy behavior is known, it can be specified…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Phillip J. K. Christoffersen , Andrew C. Li , Rodrigo Toro Icarte , Sheila A. McIlraith

The objective of a reinforcement learning agent is to behave so as to maximise the sum of a suitable scalar function of state: the reward. These rewards are typically given and immutable. In this paper, we instead consider the proposition…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Matteo Hessel , Zhongwen Xu , Manuel Kroiss , Hado van Hasselt , David Silver , Satinder Singh

For AI systems to be useful to humans, they must understand and act in accordance with our values and preferences. Since specifying preferences is a hard task, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to develop methods that allow for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Karim Abdel Sadek , Mark Bedaywi , Rhys Gould , Stuart Russell

Learning from expert demonstrations to flexibly program an autonomous system with complex behaviors or to predict an agent's behavior is a powerful tool, especially in collaborative control settings. A common method to solve this problem is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-05-15 Samuel Tesfazgi , Leonhard Sprandl , Armin Lederer , Sandra Hirche

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

Imitation Learning describes the problem of recovering an expert policy from demonstrations. While inverse reinforcement learning approaches are known to be very sample-efficient in terms of expert demonstrations, they usually require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Huang Xiao , Michael Herman , Joerg Wagner , Sebastian Ziesche , Jalal Etesami , Thai Hong Linh

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

Imitation learning is well-suited for robotic tasks where it is difficult to directly program the behavior or specify a cost for optimal control. In this work, we propose a method for learning the reward function (and the corresponding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Tianwei Ni , Harshit Sikchi , Yufei Wang , Tejus Gupta , Lisa Lee , Benjamin Eysenbach

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) denotes a powerful family of algorithms for recovering a reward function justifying the behavior demonstrated by an expert agent. A well-known limitation of IRL is the ambiguity in the choice of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-26 Alberto Maria Metelli , Filippo Lazzati , Marcello Restelli

Reward functions are central in specifying the task we want a reinforcement learning agent to perform. Given a task and desired optimal behavior, we study the problem of designing informative reward functions so that the designed rewards…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Rati Devidze , Parameswaran Kamalaruban , Adish Singla

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-08-19 Kevin Waugh , Brian D. Ziebart , J. Andrew Bagnell

Reinforcement learning (RL) typically models the interaction between the agent and environment as a Markov decision process (MDP), where the rewards that guide the agent's behavior are always observable. However, in many real-world…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Montaser Mohammedalamen , Michael Bowling

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer rewards from observed behavior, but rewards are not identified from the policy alone: many reward--value pairs can rationalize the same actions. Meaningful reward recovery therefore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Lars van der Laan , Nathan Kallus , Aurelien Bibaut

To perform robot manipulation tasks, a low-dimensional state of the environment typically needs to be estimated. However, designing a state estimator can sometimes be difficult, especially in environments with deformable objects. An…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-07-16 Xingyu Lin , Harjatin Singh Baweja , David Held

A key impediment to reinforcement learning (RL) in real applications with limited, batch data is defining a reward function that reflects what we implicitly know about reasonable behaviour for a task and allows for robust off-policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-31 Niranjani Prasad , Barbara E Engelhardt , Finale Doshi-Velez

We consider the problem of learning optimal solutions of a partially known linear optimization problem and recovering its underlying cost function where a set of past decisions and the feasible set are known. We develop a new framework,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-10 Farzin Ahmadi , Fardin Ganjkhanloo , Kimia Ghobadi