Fast Rates for Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Schlaginhaufen, Andreas, Kamgarpour, Maryam
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914567161905152
author Schlaginhaufen, Andreas
Kamgarpour, Maryam
author_facet Schlaginhaufen, Andreas
Kamgarpour, Maryam
contents We establish novel structural and statistical results for entropy-regularized min-max inverse reinforcement learning (Min-Max-IRL) with linear reward classes in finite-horizon MDPs with Borel state and action spaces. On the structural side, we show that maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and Min-Max-IRL are equivalent at the population level, and at the empirical level under deterministic dynamics. On the statistical side, exploiting pseudo-self-concordance of the Min-Max-IRL loss, we prove that both the trajectory-level KL divergence and the squared parameter error in the Hessian norm decay at the fast rate $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1})$, where $n$ is the number of expert trajectories. Our guarantees apply under misspecification and require no exploration assumptions. We further extend reward-identifiability results to general Borel spaces and derive novel results on the derivatives of the soft-optimal value function with respect to reward parameters.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_14599
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fast Rates for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Schlaginhaufen, Andreas
Kamgarpour, Maryam
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
We establish novel structural and statistical results for entropy-regularized min-max inverse reinforcement learning (Min-Max-IRL) with linear reward classes in finite-horizon MDPs with Borel state and action spaces. On the structural side, we show that maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and Min-Max-IRL are equivalent at the population level, and at the empirical level under deterministic dynamics. On the statistical side, exploiting pseudo-self-concordance of the Min-Max-IRL loss, we prove that both the trajectory-level KL divergence and the squared parameter error in the Hessian norm decay at the fast rate $\mathcal{O}(n^{-1})$, where $n$ is the number of expert trajectories. Our guarantees apply under misspecification and require no exploration assumptions. We further extend reward-identifiability results to general Borel spaces and derive novel results on the derivatives of the soft-optimal value function with respect to reward parameters.
title Fast Rates for Inverse Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14599