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Related papers: Reward Compatibility: A Framework for Inverse RL

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The aim of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is to infer a reward function $R$ from a policy $\pi$. This problem is difficult, for several reasons. First of all, there are typically multiple reward functions which are compatible with a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Joar Skalse , Alessandro Abate

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

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the problem of finding a reward function which describes observed/known expert behavior. The IRL setting is remarkably useful for automated control, in situations where the reward function is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-12 Gregory Dexter , Kevin Bello , Jean Honorio

How well do reward functions learned with inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) generalize? We illustrate that state-of-the-art IRL algorithms, which maximize a maximum-entropy objective, learn rewards that overfit to the demonstrations.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-29 Andrew Szot , Amy Zhang , Dhruv Batra , Zsolt Kira , Franziska Meier

We study inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) and imitation learning (IM), the problems of recovering a reward or policy function from expert's demonstrated trajectories. We propose a new way to improve the learning process by adding a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-23 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Patrick Jaillet

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

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

The majority of language model training builds on imitation learning. It covers pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and affects the starting conditions for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The simplicity and scalability…

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

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

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

We provide new perspectives and inference algorithms for Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), which provides a principled method to find a most non-committal reward function consistent with given expert…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Aaron J. Snoswell , Surya P. N. Singh , Nan Ye

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover the reward function and the associated optimal policy that best fits observed sequences of states and actions implemented by an expert. Many algorithms for IRL have an inherently nested…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Siliang Zeng , Chenliang Li , Alfredo Garcia , Mingyi Hong

Multi-task Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring multiple reward functions from expert demonstrations. Prior work, built on Bayesian IRL, is unable to scale to complex environments due to computational…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-17 Adam Gleave , Oliver Habryka

Inverse reinforcement learning aims to infer the reward function that explains expert behavior observed through trajectories of state--action pairs. A long-standing difficulty in classical IRL is the non-uniqueness of the recovered reward:…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-12-09 Denis Belomestny , Alexey Naumov , Sergey Samsonov

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

Imitation learning (IL) is a framework that learns to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations. Recently, IL shows promising results on high dimensional and control tasks. However, IL typically suffers from sample inefficiency in terms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Lihua Zhang

This paper presents a general framework for exploiting the representational capacity of neural networks to approximate complex, nonlinear reward functions in the context of solving the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) problem. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-03-14 Markus Wulfmeier , Peter Ondruska , Ingmar Posner

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

We propose a novel Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) method that mitigates the rigidity of fixed reward structures and the limited flexibility of implicit reward regularization. Building on the Maximum Entropy IRL framework, our approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Adib Karimi , Mohammad Mehdi Ebadzadeh