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Auteurs principaux: Benac, Leo, Sharma, Abhishek, Huyuk, Alihan, Doshi-Velez, Finale
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12831
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author Benac, Leo
Sharma, Abhishek
Huyuk, Alihan
Doshi-Velez, Finale
author_facet Benac, Leo
Sharma, Abhishek
Huyuk, Alihan
Doshi-Velez, Finale
contents 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 decision-making, such as subjective beliefs, imperfect planning, and dynamic goals. However, an often-overlooked issue in real-world behavioral datasets is that the recorded data may be missing observations that were available to the original decision-maker. In use-inspired settings such as healthcare, this can make expert actions appear suboptimal, even when they were near-optimal given the information available at the time. As a result, the rewards learned by standard IRL may be misleading. In this paper, we identify the minimal perturbations to the recorded observations needed for the expert's actions to appear optimal. We develop a practical algorithm for this problem and demonstrate its utility for quantifying the possible extent of missing observations in behavioral datasets through extensive experiments on synthetic navigation tasks, a cancer treatment simulator, and ICU treatment data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_12831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying Potential Observation Missingness in Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Benac, Leo
Sharma, Abhishek
Huyuk, Alihan
Doshi-Velez, Finale
Machine Learning
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 decision-making, such as subjective beliefs, imperfect planning, and dynamic goals. However, an often-overlooked issue in real-world behavioral datasets is that the recorded data may be missing observations that were available to the original decision-maker. In use-inspired settings such as healthcare, this can make expert actions appear suboptimal, even when they were near-optimal given the information available at the time. As a result, the rewards learned by standard IRL may be misleading. In this paper, we identify the minimal perturbations to the recorded observations needed for the expert's actions to appear optimal. We develop a practical algorithm for this problem and demonstrate its utility for quantifying the possible extent of missing observations in behavioral datasets through extensive experiments on synthetic navigation tasks, a cancer treatment simulator, and ICU treatment data.
title Quantifying Potential Observation Missingness in Inverse Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12831