Context-Hierarchy Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Kavli Affiliate: Wei Gao

| First 5 Authors: Wei Gao, David Hsu, Wee Sun Lee, ,

| Summary:

An inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) agent learns to act intelligently by
observing expert demonstrations and learning the expert’s underlying reward
function. Although learning the reward functions from demonstrations has
achieved great success in various tasks, several other challenges are mostly
ignored. Firstly, existing IRL methods try to learn the reward function from
scratch without relying on any prior knowledge. Secondly, traditional IRL
methods assume the reward functions are homogeneous across all the
demonstrations. Some existing IRL methods managed to extend to the
heterogeneous demonstrations. However, they still assume one hidden variable
that affects the behavior and learn the underlying hidden variable together
with the reward from demonstrations. To solve these issues, we present Context
Hierarchy IRL(CHIRL), a new IRL algorithm that exploits the context to scale up
IRL and learn reward functions of complex behaviors. CHIRL models the context
hierarchically as a directed acyclic graph; it represents the reward function
as a corresponding modular deep neural network that associates each network
module with a node of the context hierarchy. The context hierarchy and the
modular reward representation enable data sharing across multiple contexts and
state abstraction, significantly improving the learning performance. CHIRL has
a natural connection with hierarchical task planning when the context hierarchy
represents subtask decomposition. It enables to incorporate the prior knowledge
of causal dependencies of subtasks and make it capable of solving large complex
tasks by decoupling it into several subtasks and conquering each subtask to
solve the original task. Experiments on benchmark tasks, including a large
scale autonomous driving task in the CARLA simulator, show promising results in
scaling up IRL for tasks with complex reward functions.

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