2021

Replacing Rewards with Examples: Example-Based Policy Search via Recursive Classification

Eysenbach, Benjamin, Levine, Sergey, Salakhutdinov, Ruslan

Understand

Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms assume that users specify tasks by manually writing down a reward function.

  • However, this process can be laborious and demands considerable technical expertise.
  • Can we devise RL algorithms that instead enable users to specify tasks simply by providing examples of successful outcomes? In this paper, we derive a control algorithm that maximizes the future probability of these successful outcome examples.
  • Prior work has approached similar problems with a two-stage process, first learning a reward function and then optimizing this reward function using another RL algorithm.

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