THEMES: An Offline Apprenticeship Learning Framework for Evolving Reward Functions

Apprenticeship learning (AL) aims to induce decision-making policies by observing and imitating expert demonstrations.Existing AL approaches typically rely on online interactions and assume that the demonstrations follow a single reward function.Nevertheless, in real-world human-centric applications, policies are usually learned in an offline setting, with the demonstrations driven by multiple reward functions that evolve over time.To address these challenges, we introduce a novel AL framework: Time-aware Hierarchical EM Energy-based Sub-trajectory (THEMES) clustering.We evaluate the effectiveness of THEMES in two challenging human-centric domains -healthcare and education.Our experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that THEMES can accurately induce policies, outperforming competitive baselines and ablations, demonstrating its potential for tackling a broad range of complex, real-world human-centric tasks.

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Published
2025-08-03
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3711896.3737154
Primary Topic
Advanced Data Processing Techniques
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

THEMES: An Offline Apprenticeship Learning Framework for Evolving Reward Functions

Xi Yang, Min Chi, Ge Gao, Md Mirajul Islam
Advanced Data Processing Techniques
article

THEMES: An Offline Apprenticeship Learning Framework for Evolving Reward Functions

Xi Yang, Min Chi, Ge Gao, Md Mirajul Islam
article en

Abstract

Apprenticeship learning (AL) aims to induce decision-making policies by observing and imitating expert demonstrations.Existing AL approaches typically rely on online interactions and assume that the demonstrations follow a single reward function.Nevertheless, in real-world human-centric applications, policies are usually learned in an offline setting, with the demonstrations driven by multiple reward functions that evolve over time.To address these challenges, we introduce a novel AL framework: Time-aware Hierarchical EM Energy-based Sub-trajectory (THEMES) clustering.We evaluate the effectiveness of THEMES in two challenging human-centric domains -healthcare and education.Our experimental results across multiple datasets demonstrate that THEMES can accurately induce policies, outperforming competitive baselines and ablations, demonstrating its potential for tackling a broad range of complex, real-world human-centric tasks.

IBM (United States) (US), North Carolina State University (US), Stanford University (US)
National Science Foundation
Openalex Percentile: Top 78%
Advanced Data Processing Techniques
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