Publication
Relative Entropy Inverse Reinforcement Learning
Abdeslam Boularias; Jens Kober; Jan Peters
In: Geoffrey J. Gordon; David B. Dunson; Miroslav Dudík (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics. International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS-2011), April 11-13, Fort Lauderdale, USA, Pages 182-189, JMLR Proceedings, Vol. 15, JMLR.org, 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.