Multi Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Common Sense Reward
Neta Glazer Aviv Navon Aviv Shamsian Ethan Fetaya
One of the challenges in applying reinforcement learning in a complex
real-world environment lies in providing the agent with a sufficiently detailed
reward function. Any misalignment between the reward and the desired behavior
can result in unwanted outcomes. This may lead to issues like "reward hacking"
where the agent maximizes rewards by unintended behavior. In this work, we
propose to disentangle the reward into two distinct parts. A simple
task-specific reward, outlining the particulars of the task at hand, and an
unknown common-sense reward, indicating the expected behavior of the agent
within the environment. We then explore how this common-sense reward can be
learned from expert demonstrations. We first show that inverse reinforcement
learning, even when it succeeds in training an agent, does not learn a useful
reward function. That is, training a new agent with the learned reward does not
impair the desired behaviors. We then demonstrate that this problem can be
solved by training simultaneously on multiple tasks. That is, multi-task
inverse reinforcement learning can be applied to learn a useful reward
function.