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Related papers: A Ranking Game for Imitation Learning

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Inverse reinforcement learning is the problem of inferring a reward function from an optimal policy or demonstrations by an expert. In this work, it is assumed that the reward is expressed as a reward machine whose transitions depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mohamad Louai Shehab , Antoine Aspeel , Necmiye Ozay

Imitation Learning from Observation (ILfO) is a setting in which a learner tries to imitate the behavior of an expert, using only observational data and without the direct guidance of demonstrated actions. In this paper, we re-examine…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Wei-Di Chang , Scott Fujimoto , David Meger , Gregory Dudek

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has emerged as the standard paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. However, reward-based methods grounded in the Bradley-Terry assumption struggle to capture the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Fang Wu , Xu Huang , Weihao Xuan , Zhiwei Zhang , Yijia Xiao , Guancheng Wan , Xiaomin Li , Bing Hu , Peng Xia , Jure Leskovec , Yejin Choi

In this work we describe a novel deep reinforcement learning architecture that allows multiple actions to be selected at every time-step in an efficient manner. Multi-action policies allow complex behaviours to be learnt that would…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-09-07 Jack Harmer , Linus Gisslén , Jorge del Val , Henrik Holst , Joakim Bergdahl , Tom Olsson , Kristoffer Sjöö , Magnus Nordin

Existing alignment methods directly use the reward model learned from user preference data to optimize an LLM policy, subject to KL regularization with respect to the base policy. This practice is suboptimal for maximizing user's utility…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Haichuan Wang , Tao Lin , Lingkai Kong , Ce Li , Hezi Jiang , Milind Tambe

Designing rewards for Reinforcement Learning (RL) is challenging because it needs to convey the desired task, be efficient to optimize, and be easy to compute. The latter is particularly problematic when applying RL to robotics, where…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Yiming Ding , Carlos Florensa , Mariano Phielipp , Pieter Abbeel

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

Imitation learning seeks to circumvent the difficulty in designing proper reward functions for training agents by utilizing expert behavior. With environments modeled as Markov Decision Processes (MDP), most of the existing imitation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Dripta S. Raychaudhuri , Sujoy Paul , Jeroen van Baar , Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury

The correct specification of reward models is a well-known challenge in reinforcement learning. Hand-crafted reward functions often lead to inefficient or suboptimal policies and may not be aligned with user values. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-24 Muhan Lin , Shuyang Shi , Yue Guo , Behdad Chalaki , Vaishnav Tadiparthi , Ehsan Moradi Pari , Simon Stepputtis , Joseph Campbell , Katia Sycara

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

The potential of reinforcement learning (RL) to deliver aligned and performant agents is partially bottlenecked by the reward engineering problem. One alternative to heuristic trial-and-error is preference-based RL (PbRL), where a reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-22 Tom Bewley , Freddy Lecue

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) has recently gained immense interest due to its potential for sample efficiency and ability to incorporate off-policy data. However, designing stable and efficient MBRL algorithms using rich…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-12 Aravind Rajeswaran , Igor Mordatch , Vikash Kumar

Offline imitation learning (offline IL) enables training effective policies without requiring explicit reward annotations. Recent approaches attempt to estimate rewards for unlabeled datasets using a small set of expert demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Shengjie Sun , Jiafei Lyu , Runze Liu , Mengbei Yan , Bo Liu , Deheng Ye , Xiu Li

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) learns an optimal policy, given some expert demonstrations, thus avoiding the need for the tedious process of specifying a suitable reward function. However, current methods are constrained by at least…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-16 Pierre Le Pelletier de Woillemont , Rémi Labory , Vincent Corruble

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a key factor in aligning model behavior with users' goals. However, while humans integrate multiple strategies when making decisions, current RLHF approaches often simplify this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Mingkang Wu , Devin White , Evelyn Rose , Vernon Lawhern , Nicholas R Waytowich , Yongcan Cao

Observational learning requires an agent to learn to perform a task by referencing only observations of the performed task. This work investigates the equivalent setting in real-world robot learning where access to hand-designed rewards and…

Demonstrations are an effective alternative to task specification for learning agents in settings where designing a reward function is difficult. However, demonstrating expert behavior in the action space of the agent becomes unwieldy when…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Harshit Sikchi , Caleb Chuck , Amy Zhang , Scott Niekum

Humans achieve efficient learning by relying on prior knowledge about the structure of naturally occurring tasks. There is considerable interest in designing reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with similar properties. This includes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Jan Humplik , Alexandre Galashov , Leonard Hasenclever , Pedro A. Ortega , Yee Whye Teh , Nicolas Heess

Conveying complex objectives to reinforcement learning (RL) agents can often be difficult, involving meticulous design of reward functions that are sufficiently informative yet easy enough to provide. Human-in-the-loop RL methods allow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Kimin Lee , Laura Smith , Pieter Abbeel

One of the key issues for imitation learning lies in making policy learned from limited samples to generalize well in the whole state-action space. This problem is much more severe in high-dimensional state environments, such as game…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Xin-Qiang Cai , Yao-Xiang Ding , Yuan Jiang , Zhi-Hua Zhou