The Virtues of Pessimism in Inverse Reinforcement Learning

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02616v2
• Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2024 16:50:16 GMT
• Title: The Virtues of Pessimism in Inverse Reinforcement Learning
• Authors: David Wu and Gokul Swamy and J. Andrew Bagnell and Zhiwei Steven Wu and Sanjiban Choudhury
• Abstract summary: Inverse Reinforcement Learning is a powerful framework for learning complex behaviors from expert demonstrations. It is desirable to reduce the exploration burden by leveraging expert demonstrations in the inner-loop RL. We consider an alternative approach to speeding up the RL in IRL: emphpessimism, i.e., staying close to the expert's data distribution, instantiated via the use of offline RL algorithms.
• Score: 38.98656220917943
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) is a powerful framework for learning complex behaviors from expert demonstrations. However, it traditionally requires repeatedly solving a computationally expensive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in its inner loop. It is desirable to reduce the exploration burden by leveraging expert demonstrations in the inner-loop RL. As an example, recent work resets the learner to expert states in order to inform the learner of high-reward expert states. However, such an approach is infeasible in the real world. In this work, we consider an alternative approach to speeding up the RL subroutine in IRL: \emph{pessimism}, i.e., staying close to the expert's data distribution, instantiated via the use of offline RL algorithms. We formalize a connection between offline RL and IRL, enabling us to use an arbitrary offline RL algorithm to improve the sample efficiency of IRL. We validate our theory experimentally by demonstrating a strong correlation between the efficacy of an offline RL algorithm and how well it works as part of an IRL procedure. By using a strong offline RL algorithm as part of an IRL procedure, we are able to find policies that match expert performance significantly more efficiently than the prior art.

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