Assisted Inverse Reinforcement Learning

We study the problem of inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) with the added twist that the learner is assisted by a helpful teacher. More formally, we tackle the following algorithmic question: How could a teacher provide an informative sequence of demonstrations to an IRL agent to speed up the learning process? We prove rigorous convergence guarantees of a new iterative teaching algorithm that adaptively chooses demonstrations based on the learner’s current performance. Extensive experiments with a car driving simulator environment show that the learning progress can be speeded up drastically as compared to an uninformative teacher.