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Title: CWAE-IRL: Formulating a supervised approach to Inverse Reinforcement Learning problem

Paper content:
Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is used to infer the reward function from the actions of an expert running a Markov Decision Process (MDP).
A novel approach using variational inference for learning the reward function is proposed in this research.
Using this technique, the intractable posterior distribution of the continuous latent variable (the reward function in this case) is analytically approximated to appear to be as close to the prior belief while trying to reconstruct the future state conditioned on the current state and action.
The reward function is derived using a well-known deep generative model known as Conditional Variational Auto-encoder (CVAE) with Wasserstein loss function, thus referred to as Conditional Wasserstein Auto-encoder-IRL (CWAE-IRL), which can be analyzed as a combination of the backward and forward inference.
This can then form an efficient alternative to the previous approaches to IRL while having no knowledge of the system dynamics of the agent.
Experimental results on standard benchmarks such as objectworld and pendulum show that the proposed algorithm can effectively learn the latent reward function in complex, high-dimensional environments.
Reinforcement learning, formalized as Markov decision process (MDP), provides a general solution to sequential decision making, where given a state, the agent takes an optimal action by maximizing the long-term reward from the environment Bellman (1957) .
However, in practice, defining a reward function that weighs the features of the state correctly can be challenging, and techniques like reward shaping are often used to solve complex real-world problems Ng et al. (1999) .
The process of inferring the reward function given the demonstrations by an expert is defined as inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) or apprenticeship learning Ng et al. (2000) ; Abbeel & Ng (2004) .
The fundamental problem with IRL lies in the fact that the algorithm is under defined and infinitely different reward functions can yield the same policy Finn et al. (2016) .
Previous approaches have used preferences on the reward function to address the non-uniqueness.
Ng et al. (2000) suggested reward function that maximizes the difference in the values of the expert's policy and the second best policy.
Ziebart et al. (2008) adopted the principle of maximum entropy for learning the policy whose feature expectations are constrained to match those of the expert's.
Ratliff et al. (2006) applied the structured max-margin optimization to IRL and proposed a method for finding the reward function that maximizes the margin between expert's policy and all other policies.
Neu & Szepesvári (2009) unified a direct method that minimizes deviation from the expert's behavior and an indirect method that finds an optimal policy from the learned reward function using IRL.
Syed & Schapire (2008) used a game-theoretic framework to find a policy that improves with respect to an expert's.
Another challenge for IRL is that some variant of the forward reinforcement learning problem needs to be solved in a tightly coupled manner to obtain the corresponding policy, and then compare this policy to the demonstrated actions Finn et al. (2016) .
Most early IRL algorithms proposed solving an MDP in the inner loop Ng et al. (2000) ; Abbeel & Ng (2004); Ziebart et al. (2008) .
This requires perfect knowledge of the expert's dynamics which are almost always impossible to have.
Several works have proposed to relax this requirement, for example by learning a value function instead of a cost Todorov (2007) , solving an approximate local control problem Levine & Koltun (2012) or generating a discrete graph of states Byravan et al. (2015) .
However, all these methods still require some partial knowledge of the system dynamics.
Most of the early research in this field has expressed the reward function as a weighted linear combination of hand selected features Ng et al. (2000) ; Ramachandran & Amir (2007); Ziebart et al. (2008) .
Non-parametric methods such as Gaussian Processes (GPs) have also been used for potentially complex, nonlinear reward functions Levine et al. (2011) .
While in principle this helps extend the IRL paradigm to flexibly account for non-linear reward approximation; the use of kernels simultaneously leads to higher sample size requirements.
Universal function approximators such as non-linear deep neural network have been proposed recently Wulfmeier et al. (2015) ; Finn et al. (2016) .
This moves away from using hand-crafted features and helps in learning highly non-linear reward functions but they still need the agent in the loop to generate new samples to "guide" the cost to the optimal reward function.
Fu et al. (2017) has recently proposed deriving an adversarial reward learning formulation which disentangles the reward learning process by a discriminator trained via binary regression data and uses policy gradient algorithms to learn the policy as well.
The Bayesian IRL (BIRL) algorithm proposed by Ramachandran & Amir (2007) uses the expert's actions as evidence to update the prior on reward functions.
The reward learning and apprenticeship learning steps are solved by performing the inference using a modified Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm.
Zheng et al. (2014) described an expectation-maximization (EM) approach for solving the BIRL problem, referring to it as the Robust BIRL (RBIRL).
Variational Inference (VI) has been used as an efficient and alternative strategy to MCMC sampling for approximating posterior densities Jordan et al. (1999); Wainwright et al. (2008) .
Variational Auto-encoder (VAE) was proposed by Kingma & Welling (2014) as a neural network version of the approximate inference model.
The loss function of the VAE is given in such a way that it automatically tries to maximize the likelihood of the data given the current latent variables (reconstruction loss), while encouraging the latent variables to be close to our prior belief of how the variables should look like (KullbeckLiebler divergence loss).
This can be seen as an generalization of EM from maximum a-posteriori (MAP) estimation of the single parameter to an approximation of complete posterior distribution.
Conditional VAE (CVAE) has been proposed by Sohn et al. (2015) to develop a deep conditional generative model for structured output prediction using Gaussian latent variables.
Wasserstein AutoEncoder (WAE) has been proposed by Tolstikhin et al. (2017) to utilize Wasserstein loss function in place of KL divergence loss for robustly estimating the loss in case of small samples, where VAE fails.
This research is motivated by the observation that IRL can be formulated as a supervised learning problem with latent variable modelling.
This intuition is not unique.
It has been proposed by Klein et al. (2013) using the Cascaded Supervised IRL (CSI) approach.
However, CSI uses non-generalizable heuristics to classify the dataset and find the decision rule to estimate the reward function.
Here, I propose to utilize the CVAE framework with Wasserstein loss function to determine the non-linear, continuous reward function utilizing the expert trajectories without the need for system dynamics.
The encoder step of the CVAE is used to learn the original reward function from the next state conditioned on the current state and action.
The decoder step is used to recover the next state given the current state, action and the latent reward function.
The likelihood loss, composed of the reconstruction error and the Wasserstein loss, is then fed to optimize the CVAE network.
The Gaussian distribution is used here as the prior distribution; however, Ramachandran & Amir (2007) has described various other prior distributions which can be used based on the class of problem being solved.
Since, the states chosen are supplied by the expert's trajectories, the CWAE-IRL algorithm is run only on those states without the need to run an MDP or have the agent in the loop.
Two novel contributions are made in this paper:
• Proposing a generative model such as an auto-encoder for estimating the reward function leads to a more effective and efficient algorithm with locally optimal, analytically approximate solution.
• Using only the expert's state-action trajectories provides a robust generative solution without any knowledge of system dynamics.
Section 2 gives the background on the concepts used to build our model; Section 3 describes the proposed methodology; Section 4 gives the results and Section 5 provides the discussion and conclusions.

assistant: text: Using a supervised latent variable modeling framework to determine reward in inverse reinforcement learning task