Title: Efficient Probabilistic Performance Bounds for Inverse Reinforcement Learning,
Abstract: In the field of reinforcement learning there has been recent progress towards
safety and high-confidence bounds on policy performance. However, to our
knowledge, no practical methods exist for determining high-confidence policy
performance bounds in the inverse reinforcement learning setting---where the
true reward function is unknown and only samples of expert behavior are given.
We propose a sampling method based on Bayesian inverse reinforcement learning
that uses demonstrations to determine practical high-confidence upper bounds on
the $\alpha$-worst-case difference in expected return between any evaluation
policy and the optimal policy under the expert's unknown reward function. We
evaluate our proposed bound on both a standard grid navigation task and a
simulated driving task and achieve tighter and more accurate bounds than a
feature count-based baseline. We also give examples of how our proposed bound
can be utilized to perform risk-aware policy selection and risk-aware policy
improvement. Because our proposed bound requires several orders of magnitude
fewer demonstrations than existing high-confidence bounds, it is the first
practical method that allows agents that learn from demonstration to express
confidence in the quality of their learned policy.