Enabling Robots to Communicate Reward Functions, Sandy Huang, David Held, Pieter Abbeel and Anca Dragan

Understanding a robot's reward function is key to anticipating how the robot will act in a new situation. Our goal is to generate a set of robot behaviors that best illustrates a robot's reward function. We build on prior work modeling inference of the reward function from example behavior via Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). Prior work using IRL has focused on people teaching machines and assumes exact inference. Our insight is that when teaching people, they will not perform exact inference. We show that while leveraging models of noisy inference can be beneficial, it is also important to achieve coverage in the space of possible strategies the robot can use. We introduce a hybrid algorithm that targets informative examples via both a noisy inference model and coverage.