Analysis of Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Perturbed Demonstrations

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) addresses the problem of recovering the unknown reward function for a given Markov decision problem (MDP) given the corresponding optimal policy or a perturbed version thereof. This paper studies the space of possible solutions to the general IRL problem, when the agent is provided with incomplete/imperfect information regarding the optimal policy for the MDP whose reward must be estimated. We focus on scenarios with finite state-action spaces and discuss the constraints imposed on the set of possible solutions when the agent is provided with (i) perturbed policies; (ii) optimal policies; and (iii) incomplete policies. We discuss previous works on IRL in light of our analysis and show that, with our characterization of the solution space, it is possible to determine non-trivial closed-form solutions for the IRL problem. We also discuss several other interesting aspects of the IRL problem that stem from our analysis.