Stochastic Inverse Reinforcement Learning

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 optimal for many reward functions, and expert demonstrations may be optimal for many policies. In this work, we generalize the IRL problem to a well-posed expectation optimization problem stochastic inverse reinforcement learning (SIRL) to recover the probability distribution over reward functions. We adopt the Monte Carlo expectation-maximization (MCEM) method to estimate the parameter of the probability distribution as the first solution to the SIRL problem. The solution is succinct, robust, and transferable for a learning task and can generate alternative solutions to the IRL problem. Through our formulation, it is possible to observe the intrinsic property for the IRL problem from a global viewpoint, and our approach achieves a considerable performance on the objectworld.Comment: 8+2 pages, 5 figures, Under Revie

Bayesian multitask inverse reinforcement learning

We generalise the problem of inverse reinforcement learning to multiple tasks, from multiple demonstrations. Each one may represent one expert trying to solve a different task, or as different experts trying to solve the same task. Our main contribution is to formalise the problem as statistical preference elicitation, via a number of structured priors, whose form captures our biases about the relatedness of different tasks or expert policies. In doing so, we introduce a prior on policy optimality, which is more natural to specify. We show that our framework allows us not only to learn to efficiently from multiple experts but to also effectively differentiate between the goals of each. Possible applications include analysing the intrinsic motivations of subjects in behavioural experiments and learning from multiple teachers.Comment: Corrected version. 13 pages, 8 figure