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Main Authors: Crowley, Peter, Serlin, Zachary, Paine, Tyler, Mann, Makai, Benjamin, Michael, Belta, Calin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08707
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author Crowley, Peter
Serlin, Zachary
Paine, Tyler
Mann, Makai
Benjamin, Michael
Belta, Calin
author_facet Crowley, Peter
Serlin, Zachary
Paine, Tyler
Mann, Makai
Benjamin, Michael
Belta, Calin
contents Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) presents a powerful paradigm for learning complex robotic tasks from human demonstrations. However, most approaches make the assumption that expert demonstrations are available, which is often not the case. Those that allow for suboptimality in the demonstrations are not designed for long-horizon goals or adversarial tasks. Many desirable robot capabilities fall into one or both of these categories, thus highlighting a critical shortcoming in the ability of IRL to produce field-ready robotic agents. We introduce Sample-efficient Preference-based inverse reinforcement learning for Long-horizon Adversarial tasks from Suboptimal Hierarchical demonstrations (SPLASH), which advances the state-of-the-art in learning from suboptimal demonstrations to long-horizon and adversarial settings. We empirically validate SPLASH on a maritime capture-the-flag task in simulation, and demonstrate real-world applicability with sim-to-real translation experiments on autonomous unmanned surface vehicles. We show that our proposed methods allow SPLASH to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art in reward learning from suboptimal demonstrations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_08707
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SPLASH! Sample-efficient Preference-based inverse reinforcement learning for Long-horizon Adversarial tasks from Suboptimal Hierarchical demonstrations
Crowley, Peter
Serlin, Zachary
Paine, Tyler
Mann, Makai
Benjamin, Michael
Belta, Calin
Machine Learning
Robotics
Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) presents a powerful paradigm for learning complex robotic tasks from human demonstrations. However, most approaches make the assumption that expert demonstrations are available, which is often not the case. Those that allow for suboptimality in the demonstrations are not designed for long-horizon goals or adversarial tasks. Many desirable robot capabilities fall into one or both of these categories, thus highlighting a critical shortcoming in the ability of IRL to produce field-ready robotic agents. We introduce Sample-efficient Preference-based inverse reinforcement learning for Long-horizon Adversarial tasks from Suboptimal Hierarchical demonstrations (SPLASH), which advances the state-of-the-art in learning from suboptimal demonstrations to long-horizon and adversarial settings. We empirically validate SPLASH on a maritime capture-the-flag task in simulation, and demonstrate real-world applicability with sim-to-real translation experiments on autonomous unmanned surface vehicles. We show that our proposed methods allow SPLASH to significantly outperform the state-of-the-art in reward learning from suboptimal demonstrations.
title SPLASH! Sample-efficient Preference-based inverse reinforcement learning for Long-horizon Adversarial tasks from Suboptimal Hierarchical demonstrations
topic Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08707