The paper introduces a statistical framework for Inverse Entropy-regularized Reinforcement Learning that resolves the non-uniqueness of reward functions by combining entropy regularization with a least-squares reconstruction of the reward from the soft Bellman residual. It models expert demonstrations as a Markov chain, estimates the expert policy via penalized maximum likelihood, and provides high-probability bounds on the excess Kullback–Leibler divergence between the estimated and true policies. These results yield non-asymptotic minimax optimal convergence rates for the least-squares reward function, highlighting the trade-offs among smoothing, model complexity, and sample size.
By Denis Belomestny, Alexey Naumov, Artemy Rubtsov, Sergey Samsonov
arXiv:2604. 06039v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL).
By Zhichao Jia, Guanghui Lan
arXiv:2607. 29617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation learning (IL)---training an agent to replicate expert behavior from demonstrations---underpins applications from robotics to language model training.
By Luca Viano, Antoine Moulin, Audrey Huang, Volkan Cevher, Philip Amortila, Dylan J. Foster
arXiv:2405. 16668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Adversarial Imitation Learning (AIL) faces challenges with sample inefficiency because of its reliance on sufficient on-policy data to evaluate the performance of the current policy during reward function updates.
By Yilei Chen, Vittorio Giammarino, James Queeney, Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis
arXiv:2510. 09222v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) has shown remarkable ability in modeling complex distributions and achieves strong performance in offline imitation learning for cloning expert behaviors.
By Zhenglin Wan, Jingxuan Wu, Xingrui Yu, Chubin Zhang, Mingcong Lei, Bo An, Ivor Tsang
arXiv:2606. 30923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation Learning is a natural framework for learning in sequential decision-making systems and has emerged as the dominant paradigm through which we understand language model training.
By Ved Sriraman, Peihan Liu, Daniel Hsu, Adam Block
arXiv:2606. 01382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference alignment is central to improving large language models, but standard reward-based formulations can be restrictive when human preferences are cyclic, non-transitive, or otherwise not representable by a scalar reward.
By Tianlong Nan, Xiaopeng Li, Christian Kroer, Tianyi Lin
arXiv:2602. 02762v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Semi-supervised imitation learning (SSIL) consists in learning a policy from a small dataset of action-labeled trajectories and a much larger dataset of action-free trajectories.
By Sacha Morin, Moonsub Byeon, Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau, S\'ebastien Lachapelle
arXiv:2608. 09389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This note aims to serve as an entry point to the literature on learning in games, a topic with significant theoretical appeal and a wide range of applications -- from machine learning and data science to economics and beyond.
By Panayotis Mertikopoulos
arXiv:2603. 10184v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Statistical inference with bandit data presents fundamental challenges owing to adaptive sampling, which violates the independence assumptions underlying classical asymptotic theory.
By Budhaditya Halder, Ishan Sengupta, Koustav Chowdhury, Samya Praharaj, Koulik Khamaru
arXiv:2605. 11020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories.
By Anish Diwan, Davide Tateo, Christopher E. Mower, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Jan Peters, Oleg Arenz
arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.
By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters