Receding Horizon Inverse Reinforcement Learning
This work solves the problem of scaling IRL to complex systems for researchers and practitioners in robotics and control, though it is incremental as it builds on existing IRL methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) for high-dimensional, noisy, continuous systems by introducing RHIRL, which addresses scalability and robustness challenges, resulting in outperformance over leading IRL algorithms in most benchmark tasks.
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to infer a cost function that explains the underlying goals and preferences of expert demonstrations. This paper presents receding horizon inverse reinforcement learning (RHIRL), a new IRL algorithm for high-dimensional, noisy, continuous systems with black-box dynamic models. RHIRL addresses two key challenges of IRL: scalability and robustness. To handle high-dimensional continuous systems, RHIRL matches the induced optimal trajectories with expert demonstrations locally in a receding horizon manner and 'stitches' together the local solutions to learn the cost; it thereby avoids the 'curse of dimensionality'. This contrasts sharply with earlier algorithms that match with expert demonstrations globally over the entire high-dimensional state space. To be robust against imperfect expert demonstrations and control noise, RHIRL learns a state-dependent cost function 'disentangled' from system dynamics under mild conditions. Experiments on benchmark tasks show that RHIRL outperforms several leading IRL algorithms in most instances. We also prove that the cumulative error of RHIRL grows linearly with the task duration.