A review of inverse reinforcement learning theory and recent advances

A major challenge faced by machine learning community is the decision making problems under uncertainty. Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques provide a powerful solution for it. An agent used by RL interacts with a dynamic environment and finds a policy through a reward function, without using tar...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shao, Zhifei, Er, Meng Joo
Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Language:English
Published: 2013
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/96908
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/12003
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
Description
Summary:A major challenge faced by machine learning community is the decision making problems under uncertainty. Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques provide a powerful solution for it. An agent used by RL interacts with a dynamic environment and finds a policy through a reward function, without using target labels like Supervised Learning (SL). However, one fundamental assumption of existing RL algorithms is that reward function, the most succinct representation of the designer's intention, needs to be provided beforehand. In practice, the reward function can be very hard to specify and exhaustive to tune for large and complex problems, and this inspires the development of Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL), an extension of RL, which directly tackles this problem by learning the reward function through expert demonstrations. IRL introduces a new way of learning policies by deriving expert's intentions, in contrast to directly learning policies, which can be redundant and have poor generalization ability. In this paper, the original IRL algorithms and its close variants, as well as their recent advances are reviewed and compared.