Date of Award

5-2025

Degree Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Committee Chair

Dr. Bikramjit Banerjee

Committee Chair School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Committee Member 2

Dr. Andrew Sung

Committee Member 2 School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Committee Member 3

Dr. Bo Li

Committee Member 3 School

Computing Sciences and Computer Engineering

Abstract

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) has emerged as a popular approach for training robots from human/expert demonstration, where a learner/robot infers the expert's hidden reward function using the demonstrations and a simulator. We argue that noise is inevitable in certain parts of the demonstration, and show that such noise does indeed deteriorate the performance of a popular and widely applied IRL method, called Adversarial IRL (AIRL). To render AIRL robust to noise, we formulate the problem of reward inference as one of log-likelihood optimization that accommodates noisy input. We adopt two techniques from the literature on learning hidden representations in sequential decision tasks and combine them with AIRL to solve this unified optimization problem. Experiments in four benchmark OpenAI Gym environments show that our proposed methods are effective in overcoming demonstration noise for the task of reward learning, but less so for the task of reproducing the expert behavior.

ORCID ID

0009-0003-2565-5310

Available for download on Saturday, May 01, 2027

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