Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.00758

Scalable Multi-Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

By learning transferable rewards, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) enables counterfactual evaluation of agents under modified environments. Such transfer places strict requirements on coverage since target environments affect agents' state occupancy. We propose a multi-task IRL method that pools data across multiple agents with different rewards in the same environment under a low-rank assumption. In addition to alleviating coverage requirements, so each task need not visit every state as long as others do, the method offers scalable evaluation of multiple tasks under new environments as computationally intensive planning scales with rank rather than the number of tasks. We provide finite sample guarantees on reward recovery and on policy learning in new environments. Experiments show our method is robust to limited coverage, recovers rewards on and off of each task's support, transfers to target environments at lower regret than baselines, with its computational advantage over per-task methods widening as tasks grow.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Allen Tran, Jia Wan, Nathan Kallus, Aurélien Bibaut. 2026-09-30. Scalable Multi-Task Inverse Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00758

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Roto-translated Local Coordinate Frames For Interacting Dynamical Systems

Modelling interactions is critical in learning complex dynamical systems, namely systems of interacting objects with highly non-linear and time-dependent behaviour. A large class of such systems can be formalized as $\textit{geometric graphs}$, $\textit{i.e.}$, graphs with nodes positioned in the Euclidean space given an $\textit{arbitrarily}$ chosen global coordinate system, for instance vehicles in a traffic scene. Notwithstanding the arbitrary global coordinate system, the governing dynamics of the respective dynamical systems are invariant to rotations and translations, also known as $\textit{Galilean invariance}$. As ignoring these invariances leads to worse generalization, in this work we propose local coordinate frames per node-object to induce roto-translation invariance to the geometric graph of the interacting dynamical system. Further, the local coordinate frames allow for a natural definition of anisotropic filtering in graph neural networks. Experiments in traffic scenes, 3D motion capture, and colliding particles demonstrate that the proposed approach comfortably outperforms the recent state-of-the-art.

cs.LG↗

Geometry-Aware Adaptation for Pretrained Models

Machine learning models -- including prominent zero-shot models -- are often trained on datasets whose labels are only a small proportion of a larger label space. Such spaces are commonly equipped with a metric that relates the labels via distances between them. We propose a simple approach to exploit this information to adapt the trained model to reliably predict new classes -- or, in the case of zero-shot prediction, to improve its performance -- without any additional training. Our technique is a drop-in replacement of the standard prediction rule, swapping argmax with the Fréchet mean. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis for this approach, studying (i) learning-theoretic results trading off label space diameter, sample complexity, and model dimension, (ii) characterizations of the full range of scenarios in which it is possible to predict any unobserved class, and (iii) an optimal active learning-like next class selection procedure to obtain optimal training classes for when it is not possible to predict the entire range of unobserved classes. Empirically, using easily-available external metrics, our proposed approach, Loki, gains up to 29.7% relative improvement over SimCLR on ImageNet and scales to hundreds of thousands of classes. When no such metric is available, Loki can use self-derived metrics from class embeddings and obtains a 10.5% improvement on pretrained zero-shot models such as CLIP.

cs.LG↗

Information propagation dynamics in Deep Graph Networks

Graphs are a highly expressive abstraction for modeling entities and their relations, such as molecular structures, social networks, and traffic networks. Deep Graph Networks (DGNs) have emerged as a family of deep learning models that can effectively process and learn such structured information. However, learning effective information propagation patterns within DGNs remains a critical challenge that heavily influences the model capabilities, both in the static domain and in the temporal domain (where features and/or topology evolve). Given this challenge, this thesis investigates the dynamics of information propagation within DGNs for static and dynamic graphs, focusing on their design as dynamical systems. Throughout this work, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed architectures in propagating and preserving long-term dependencies between nodes, and in learning complex spatio-temporal patterns from irregular and sparsely sampled dynamic graphs. In summary, this thesis provides a comprehensive exploration of the intersection between graphs, deep learning, and dynamical systems, offering insights and advancements for the field of graph representation learning and paving the way for more effective and versatile graph-based learning models.

cs.LG↗