PsiPhi-Learning: Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations using Successor Features and Inverse Temporal Difference Learning

We study a setting in which an agent has access to data from the interaction of other agents with the same environment. However, it has no access to the rewards or goals of these agents, and their objectives and levels of expertise may vary widely. These assumptions are common in multi-agent settings, such as driving. To effectively use this data, we turn to the framework of successor features. This allows us to disentangle shared features and dynamics of the environment from agent-specific rewards and policies. We propose a multi-task inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm, called inverse temporal difference learning (ITD), that learns shared state features, alongside per-agent successor features and preference vectors, purely from demonstrations without reward labels. We further show how to seamlessly integrate ITD with learning from online environment interactions, arriving at a novel algorithm for reinforcement learning with demonstrations, called PsiPhi-learning (pronounced `Sci-Fi'). We provide empirical evidence for the effectiveness of PsiPhi-learning in a variety of environments, on RL, imitation, IRL, and few-shot transfer, and derive worst-case bounds for its performance in zero-shot transfer to new tasks.

• Machine Intelligence