Inverse Constraint Learning and Generalization
by Transferable Reward Decomposition

Jaehwi Jang, Minjae Song, Daehyung Park
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

Abstract

Inverse constraint learning (ICL) recovers constraints from constrained demonstrations to be used in new scenarios. However, ICL suffers from an ill-posedness, leading to task-relevant reward present in the recovered constraints, a major factor of inaccurate inference of constraints from demonstrations. We introduce a transferable constraint learning (TCL) algorithm that jointly infers a task-relevant reward and task-agnostic constraint, enabling the generalization of inferred constraints. TCL additively decomposes the overall reward from the inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) algorithm into a task reward and a soft constraint, by maximizing the divergence between task-relevant policy and constraint policy.  Our statistical evaluation in three simulated two-dimensional manipulation environments shows TCL outperforms state-of-the-art IRL and ICL algorithms. Further, we demonstrate the effectiveness of TCL on two real-world object carrying tasks.

 

Demonstrations

Tray-carrying with Franka Panda

Wall-following with 3D-printed wall