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