2020

Safe Imitation Learning via Fast Bayesian Reward Inference from Preferences

Brown, Daniel S., Coleman, Russell, Srinivasan, Ravi et al.

Understand

Bayesian reward learning from demonstrations enables rigorous safety and uncertainty analysis when performing imitation learning.

  • However, Bayesian reward learning methods are typically computationally intractable for complex control problems.
  • We propose Bayesian Reward Extrapolation (Bayesian REX), a highly efficient Bayesian reward learning algorithm that scales to high-dimensional imitation learning problems by pre-training a low-dimensional feature encoding via self-supervised tasks and then leveraging preferences over demonstrations to perform fast Bayesian inference.
  • Bayesian REX can learn to play Atari games from demonstrations, without access to the game score and can generate 100,000 samples from the posterior over reward functions in only 5 minutes on a personal laptop.

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