Learning to Optimize via Wasserstein Deep Inverse Optimal Control

Abstract: We study the inverse optimal control problem in social sciences: we aim at learning a user's true cost function from the observed temporal behavior. In contrast to traditional phenomenological works that aim to learn a generative model to fit the behavioral data, we propose a novel variational principle and treat user as a reinforcement learning algorithm, which acts by optimizing his cost function. We first propose a unified KL framework that generalizes existing maximum entropy inverse optimal control methods. We further propose a two-step Wasserstein inverse optimal control framework. In the first step, we compute the optimal measure with a novel mass transport equation. In the second step, we formulate the learning problem as a generative adversarial network. In two real world experiments - recommender systems and social networks, we show that our framework obtains significant performance gains over both existing inverse optimal control methods and point process based generative models.