Better Than Diverse Demonstrators: Reward Decomposition From Suboptimal and Heterogeneous Demonstrations

Chunyue Xue, Letian Chen, Matthew C. Gombolay

Abstract: Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) typically involves inferring a reward function from expert demonstrations to enable agents to imitate the demonstrated behavior. However, real-world settings often provide suboptimal and heterogeneous demonstrations, where human demonstrators use diverse strategies and imperfect actions. Yet, we are unaware of any prior work that simultaneously addresses the challenges of IRL, of which demonstrations are both heterogeneous and suboptimal. In this work, we propose a novel approach, REPRESENT (Reward dEcomPosition fRom hEterogeneous Suboptimal dEmoNstraTion), that disentangles the latent intrinsic task reward and the strategy-specific reward from suboptimal and diverse strategies. Our method learns to identify a shared task reward component that generalizes across varying demonstrator preferences while also modeling distinct strategy-specific rewards. By decomposing the common task reward across varied demonstrations, REPRESENT extracts the core objectives shared by all strategies, enabling the agent to perform better than the demonstrators while preserving individual strategy preferences. We validate our approach on three robotic domains, showing a higher correlation with the true task reward and improved policy performance compared to baselines. These results suggest that REPRESENT can effectively handle suboptimality and heterogeneity, providing a solution for real-world LfD applications to better learn from demonstrations varied in quality and strategy.

External IDs:dblp:journals/ral/XueCG25