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Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to infer a reward from expert demonstrations, motivated by the idea that the reward, rather than the policy, is the most succinct and transferable description of a task [Ng et al., 2000]. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Andreas Schlaginhaufen , Maryam Kamgarpour

Reward functions are difficult to design and often hard to align with human intent. Preference-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms address these problems by learning reward functions from human feedback. However, the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Joey Hejna , Dorsa Sadigh

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) seeks to infer reward functions from expert demonstrations. When demonstrations originate from multiple experts with different intentions, the problem is known as Multi-Intention IRL (MI-IRL). Recent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Antonio Mone , Frans A. Oliehoek , Luciano Cavalcante Siebert

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

Large language models (LLMs) trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, but their underlying reward functions and decision-making processes remain opaque. This paper introduces…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jared Joselowitz , Ritam Majumdar , Arjun Jagota , Matthieu Bou , Nyal Patel , Satyapriya Krishna , Sonali Parbhoo

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), a learning agent infers a reward function encoding the underlying task using demonstrations from experts. However, many existing IRL techniques make the often unrealistic assumption that the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-04 Franck Djeumou , Christian Ellis , Murat Cubuktepe , Craig Lennon , Ufuk Topcu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods assume that the expert data is generated by an agent optimizing some reward function. However, in many settings, the agent may optimize a reward function subject to some constraints, where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-01 Ashish Gaurav , Kasra Rezaee , Guiliang Liu , Pascal Poupart

Many imitation learning (IL) algorithms employ inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to infer the intrinsic reward function that an expert is implicitly optimizing for based on their demonstrated behaviors. However, in practice, IRL-based IL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-08 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to explain observed strategic behavior by fitting reinforcement learning models to behavioral data. However, traditional IRL methods are only applicable when the observations are in the form of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-26 Antti Kangasrääsiö , Samuel Kaski

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-24 Shicheng Liu , Minghui Zhu

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

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is computationally challenging, with common approaches requiring the solution of multiple reinforcement learning (RL) sub-problems. This work motivates the use of potential-based reward shaping to reduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Lauren H. Cooke , Harvey Klyne , Edwin Zhang , Cassidy Laidlaw , Milind Tambe , Finale Doshi-Velez

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of learning the preferences of an agent from the observations of its behavior on a task. While this problem has been well investigated, the related problem of {\em online} IRL---where the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-19 Saurabh Arora , Prashant Doshi , Bikramjit Banerjee

We provide an original theoretical study of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) through the lens of reward compatibility, a novel framework to quantify the compatibility of a reward with the given expert's demonstrations. Intuitively, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Filippo Lazzati , Mirco Mutti , Alberto Metelli

The goal of the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem is to recover the reward functions from expert demonstrations. However, the IRL problem like any ill-posed inverse problem suffers the congenital defect that the policy may be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-26 Ce Ju

An inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) agent learns to act intelligently by observing expert demonstrations and learning the expert's underlying reward function. Although learning the reward functions from demonstrations has achieved great…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Wei Gao , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Reinforcement learning provides a powerful and general framework for decision making and control, but its application in practice is often hindered by the need for extensive feature and reward engineering. Deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-15 Justin Fu , Katie Luo , Sergey Levine

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) learns a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstration data of an expert. However, in the current IRL setting, the learner is isolated from the expert and can only passively…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yue Mao , Shicheng Liu , Siyuan Xu , Minghui Zhu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and dynamic discrete choice (DDC) models explain sequential decision-making by recovering reward functions that rationalize observed behavior. Flexible IRL methods typically rely on machine learning but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Lars van der Laan , Aurelien Bibaut , Nathan Kallus

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is attractive in scenarios where reward engineering can be tedious. However, prior IRL algorithms use on-policy transitions, which require intensive sampling from the current policy for stable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Hana Hoshino , Kei Ota , Asako Kanezaki , Rio Yokota