Supervised Reward Inference

Abstract: Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions that are suboptimal due to poor planning or execution to behaviors which are intended to communicate goals rather than achieve them. We propose that supervised learning offers a unified framework to infer reward functions from any class of behavior, and show that such an approach is asymptotically Bayes-optimal under mild assumptions. Experiments on simulated robotic manipulation tasks show that our method can efficiently infer rewards from a wide variety of arbitrarily suboptimal demonstrations.