Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Contextual MDPs

Abstract: We consider the task of Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Contextual Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In this setting, contexts, which define the reward and transition kernel, are sampled from a distribution. In addition, although the reward is a function of the context, it is not provided to the agent. Instead, the agent observes demonstrations from an optimal policy. The goal is to learn the reward mapping, such that the agent will act optimally even when encountering previously unseen contexts, also known as zero-shot transfer. We formulate this problem as a non-differential convex optimization problem and propose a novel algorithm to compute its subgradients. Based on this scheme, we analyze several methods both theoretically, where we compare the sample complexity and scalability, and empirically. Most importantly, we show both theoretically and empirically that our algorithms perform zero-shot transfer (generalize to new and unseen contexts). Specifically, we present empirical experiments in a dynamic treatment regime, where the goal is to learn a reward function which explains the behavior of expert physicians based on recorded data of them treating patients diagnosed with sepsis.