Reward Compatibility: A Framework for Inverse RL

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Lazzati, Filippo, Mutti, Mirco, Metelli, Alberto
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Lazzati, Filippo
Mutti, Mirco
Metelli, Alberto
author_facet Lazzati, Filippo
Mutti, Mirco
Metelli, Alberto
contents 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 reward is more compatible with the demonstrations the closer the performance of the expert's policy computed with that reward is to the optimal performance for that reward. This generalizes the notion of feasible reward set, the most common framework in the theoretical IRL literature, for which a reward is either compatible or not compatible. The grayscale introduced by the reward compatibility is the key to extend the realm of provably efficient IRL far beyond what is attainable with the feasible reward set: from tabular to large-scale MDPs. We analyze the IRL problem across various settings, including optimal and suboptimal expert's demonstrations and both online and offline data collection. For all of these dimensions, we provide a tractable algorithm and corresponding sample complexity analysis, as well as various insights on reward compatibility and how the framework can pave the way to yet more general problem settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_07996
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reward Compatibility: A Framework for Inverse RL
Lazzati, Filippo
Mutti, Mirco
Metelli, Alberto
Machine Learning
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 reward is more compatible with the demonstrations the closer the performance of the expert's policy computed with that reward is to the optimal performance for that reward. This generalizes the notion of feasible reward set, the most common framework in the theoretical IRL literature, for which a reward is either compatible or not compatible. The grayscale introduced by the reward compatibility is the key to extend the realm of provably efficient IRL far beyond what is attainable with the feasible reward set: from tabular to large-scale MDPs. We analyze the IRL problem across various settings, including optimal and suboptimal expert's demonstrations and both online and offline data collection. For all of these dimensions, we provide a tractable algorithm and corresponding sample complexity analysis, as well as various insights on reward compatibility and how the framework can pave the way to yet more general problem settings.
title Reward Compatibility: A Framework for Inverse RL
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.07996