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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

Reinforcement learning (RL) problems where the learner attempts to infer an unobserved reward from some feedback variables have been studied in several recent papers. The setting of Interaction-Grounded Learning (IGL) is an example of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Xiaoyan Hu , Farzan Farnia , Ho-fung Leung

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

Applying probabilistic models to reinforcement learning (RL) enables the application of powerful optimisation tools such as variational inference to RL. However, existing inference frameworks and their algorithms pose significant challenges…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Matthew Fellows , Anuj Mahajan , Tim G. J. Rudner , Shimon Whiteson

Reinforcement learning (RL) promises to enable autonomous acquisition of complex behaviors for diverse agents. However, the success of current reinforcement learning algorithms is predicated on an often under-emphasised requirement -- each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Archit Sharma , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine , Karol Hausman , Chelsea Finn

Bayesian inference provides principled uncertainty quantification, but accurate posterior sampling with MCMC can be computationally prohibitive for modern applications. Variational inference (VI) offers a scalable alternative and often…

Methodology · Statistics 2026-05-14 Laura Battaglia , Stefano Cortinovis , Chris Holmes , David T. Frazier , Jack Jewson

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

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful set of techniques for imitation learning that aims to learn a reward function that rationalizes expert demonstrations. Unfortunately, traditional IRL methods suffer from a computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-31 Gokul Swamy , Sanjiban Choudhury , J. Andrew Bagnell , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Vanilla variational inference finds an optimal approximation to the Bayesian posterior distribution, but even the exact Bayesian posterior is often not meaningful under model misspecification. We propose predictive variational inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-31 Jinlin Lai , Antonio Linero , Yuling Yao

Reinforcement learning is about learning agent models that make the best sequential decisions in unknown environments. In an unknown environment, the agent needs to explore the environment while exploiting the collected information, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-12 Hong Qian , Yang Yu

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

Variational inference (VI) provides a principled framework for estimating posterior distributions over model parameters, enabling explicit modeling of weight uncertainty during optimization. By capturing this uncertainty, VI improves the…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-01-21 Haolin Chen

Variational Inference (VI) is a popular alternative to asymptotically exact sampling in Bayesian inference. Its main workhorse is optimization over a reverse Kullback-Leibler divergence (RKL), which typically underestimates the tail of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-01 Ghassen Jerfel , Serena Wang , Clara Fannjiang , Katherine A. Heller , Yian Ma , Michael I. Jordan

Offline inverse reinforcement learning (Offline IRL) aims to recover the structure of rewards and environment dynamics that underlie observed actions in a fixed, finite set of demonstrations from an expert agent. Accurate models of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Alexander Tschantz , Beren Millidge , Anil K. Seth , Christopher L. Buckley

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a general framework concerned with an agent that seeks to maximize rewards in an environment. The learning typically happens through trial and error using explorative methods, such as epsilon-greedy. There are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Per-Arne Andersen , Morten Goodwin , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms find applications in inventory control, recommender systems, vehicular traffic management, cloud computing and robotics. The real-world complications of many tasks arising in these domains makes them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-03 Sindhu Padakandla

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

The alignment of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for generating helpful and harmless content. Existing approaches leverage preference-based human feedback data to learn the reward function and align the LLM with the feedback data.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-15 Yuang Cai , Yuyu Yuan , Jinsheng Shi , Qinhong Lin

We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics. Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-26 Ahmed H. Qureshi , Byron Boots , Michael C. Yip