Learning task specifications from demonstrations

Marcell Vazquez-Chanlatte, Susmit Jha, Ashish Tiwari, Mark K. Ho, Sanjit A. Seshia

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

Abstract

Real-world applications often naturally decompose into several sub-tasks. In many settings (e.g., robotics) demonstrations provide a natural way to specify the sub-tasks. However, most methods for learning from demonstrations either do not provide guarantees that the artifacts learned for the sub-tasks can be safely recombined or limit the types of composition available. Motivated by this deficit, we consider the problem of inferring Boolean non-Markovian rewards (also known as logical trace properties or specifications) from demonstrations provided by an agent operating in an uncertain, stochastic environment. Crucially, specifications admit well-defined composition rules that are typically easy to interpret. In this paper, we formulate the specification inference task as a maximum a posteriori (MAP) probability inference problem, apply the principle of maximum entropy to derive an analytic demonstration likelihood model and give an efficient approach to search for the most likely specification in a large candidate pool of specifications. In our experiments, we demonstrate how learning specifications can help avoid common problems that often arise due to ad-hoc reward composition.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)5367-5377
Number of pages11
JournalAdvances in Neural Information Processing Systems
Volume2018-December
StatePublished - 2018
Event32nd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, NeurIPS 2018 - Montreal, Canada
Duration: Dec 2 2018Dec 8 2018

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Information Systems
  • Signal Processing

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