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Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the task of learning a single reward function given a Markov Decision Process (MDP) without defining the reward function, and a set of demonstrations generated by humans/experts. However, in practice,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-12-18 Siddharthan Rajasekaran , Jinwei Zhang , Jie Fu

Two main challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL) are designing appropriate reward functions and ensuring the safety of the learned policy. To address these challenges, we present a theoretical framework for Inverse Reinforcement Learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

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

We model human decision-making behaviors in a risk-taking task using inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for the purposes of understanding real human decision making under risk. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work applying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-14 Quanying Liu , Haiyan Wu , Anqi Liu

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

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), where the learning agent recovers a reward function using expert demonstrations. Most of the existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Franck Djeumou , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function that generates a given optimal policy for a given Markov Decision Process. This paper looks at an algorithmic-independent geometric analysis of the IRL problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Abi Komanduru , Jean Honorio

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) aligns Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences, yet the underlying reward signals they internalize remain hidden, posing a critical challenge for interpretability and safety.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Nyal Patel , Matthieu Bou , Arjun Jagota , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

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

It is often very challenging to manually design reward functions for complex, real-world tasks. To solve this, one can instead use reward learning to infer a reward function from data. However, there are often multiple reward functions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Joar Skalse , Matthew Farrugia-Roberts , Stuart Russell , Alessandro Abate , Adam Gleave

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

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

Explicit engineering of reward functions for given environments has been a major hindrance to reinforcement learning methods. While Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a solution to recover reward functions from demonstrations only,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-24 David Venuto , Jhelum Chakravorty , Leonard Boussioux , Junhao Wang , Gavin McCracken , Doina Precup

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) -- the problem of learning reward functions from demonstrations of an \emph{expert policy} -- plays a critical role in developing intelligent systems. While widely used in applications, theoretical…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-13 Lei Zhao , Mengdi Wang , Yu Bai

In Reward Learning (ReL), we are given feedback on an unknown target reward, and the goal is to use this information to recover it in order to carry out some downstream application, e.g., planning. When the feedback is not informative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Filippo Lazzati , Alberto Maria Metelli

As AI systems become increasingly autonomous, aligning their decision-making to human preferences is essential. In domains like autonomous driving or robotics, it is impossible to write down the reward function representing these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Ondrej Bajgar , Sid William Gould , Rohan Narayan Langford Mitta , Jonathon Liu , Oliver Newcombe , Jack Golden

The problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is relevant to a variety of tasks including value alignment and robot learning from demonstration. Despite significant algorithmic contributions in recent years, IRL remains an ill-posed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-18 Sreejith Balakrishnan , Quoc Phong Nguyen , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low , Harold Soh

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

Robots can adapt to user preferences by learning reward functions from demonstrations, but with limited data, reward models often overfit to spurious correlations and fail to generalize. This happens because demonstrations show robots how…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Minyoung Hwang , Alexandra Forsey-Smerek , Nathaniel Dennler , Andreea Bobu

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