Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Abdeslam Boularias, Jens Kober, Jan Peters
Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, PMLR 15:182-189, 2011.

Abstract

We consider the problem of imitation learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is optimally acting in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Most of the past work on IRL requires that a (near)-optimal policy can be computed for different reward functions. However, this requirement can hardly be satisfied in systems with a large, or continuous, state space. In this paper, we propose a model-free IRL algorithm, where the relative entropy between the empirical distribution of the state-action trajectories under a baseline policy and their distribution under the learned policy is minimized by stochastic gradient descent. We compare this new approach to well-known IRL algorithms using learned MDP models. Empirical results on simulated car racing, gridworld and ball-in-a-cup problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.

Cite this Paper

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v15-boularias11a, title = {Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning}, author = {Boularias, Abdeslam and Kober, Jens and Peters, Jan}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics}, pages = {182--189}, year = {2011}, editor = {Gordon, Geoffrey and Dunson, David and Dudík, Miroslav}, volume = {15}, series = {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research}, address = {Fort Lauderdale, FL, USA}, month = {11--13 Apr}, publisher = {PMLR}, pdf = {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v15/boularias11a/boularias11a.pdf}, url = {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v15/boularias11a.html}, abstract = {We consider the problem of imitation learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is optimally acting in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Most of the past work on IRL requires that a (near)-optimal policy can be computed for different reward functions. However, this requirement can hardly be satisfied in systems with a large, or continuous, state space. In this paper, we propose a model-free IRL algorithm, where the relative entropy between the empirical distribution of the state-action trajectories under a baseline policy and their distribution under the learned policy is minimized by stochastic gradient descent. We compare this new approach to well-known IRL algorithms using learned MDP models. Empirical results on simulated car racing, gridworld and ball-in-a-cup problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.} }
Endnote
%0 Conference Paper %T Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning %A Abdeslam Boularias %A Jens Kober %A Jan Peters %B Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics %C Proceedings of Machine Learning Research %D 2011 %E Geoffrey Gordon %E David Dunson %E Miroslav Dudík %F pmlr-v15-boularias11a %I PMLR %P 182--189 %U https://proceedings.mlr.press/v15/boularias11a.html %V 15 %X We consider the problem of imitation learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is optimally acting in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Most of the past work on IRL requires that a (near)-optimal policy can be computed for different reward functions. However, this requirement can hardly be satisfied in systems with a large, or continuous, state space. In this paper, we propose a model-free IRL algorithm, where the relative entropy between the empirical distribution of the state-action trajectories under a baseline policy and their distribution under the learned policy is minimized by stochastic gradient descent. We compare this new approach to well-known IRL algorithms using learned MDP models. Empirical results on simulated car racing, gridworld and ball-in-a-cup problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.
RIS
TY - CPAPER TI - Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning AU - Abdeslam Boularias AU - Jens Kober AU - Jan Peters BT - Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics DA - 2011/06/14 ED - Geoffrey Gordon ED - David Dunson ED - Miroslav Dudík ID - pmlr-v15-boularias11a PB - PMLR DP - Proceedings of Machine Learning Research VL - 15 SP - 182 EP - 189 L1 - http://proceedings.mlr.press/v15/boularias11a/boularias11a.pdf UR - https://proceedings.mlr.press/v15/boularias11a.html AB - We consider the problem of imitation learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is optimally acting in a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Most of the past work on IRL requires that a (near)-optimal policy can be computed for different reward functions. However, this requirement can hardly be satisfied in systems with a large, or continuous, state space. In this paper, we propose a model-free IRL algorithm, where the relative entropy between the empirical distribution of the state-action trajectories under a baseline policy and their distribution under the learned policy is minimized by stochastic gradient descent. We compare this new approach to well-known IRL algorithms using learned MDP models. Empirical results on simulated car racing, gridworld and ball-in-a-cup problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations. ER -
APA
Boularias, A., Kober, J. & Peters, J.. (2011). Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning. Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics, in Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 15:182-189 Available from https://proceedings.mlr.press/v15/boularias11a.html.

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