Online Inverse Reinforcement Learning Under Occlusion

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of learning the preferences of an agent from observing its behavior on a task. While this problem is witnessing sustained attention, the related problem of online IRL where the observations are incrementally accrued, yet the real-time demands of the application often prohibit a full rerun of an IRL method has received much less attention. We introduce a formal framework for online IRL, called incremental IRL (12RL), and a new method that advances maximum entropy IRL with hidden variables, to this setting. Our analysis shows that the new method has a monotonically improving performance with more demonstration data, as well as probabilistically bounded error, both under full and partial observability. Experiments in a simulated robotic application, which involves learning under occlusion, show the significantly improved performance of 12RL as compared to both batch IRL and an online imitation learning method.