Convergence of a model-free entropy-regularized inverse reinforcement learning algorithm

Given a dataset of expert demonstrations, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward for which the expert is optimal. This work proposes a model-free algorithm to solve entropy-regularized IRL problem. In particular, we employ a stochastic gradient descent update for the reward and a stochastic soft policy iteration update for the policy. Assuming access to a generative model, we prove that our algorithm is guaranteed to recover a reward for which the expert is $\varepsilon$-optimal using $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ samples of the Markov decision process (MDP). Furthermore, with $\mathcal{O}(1/\varepsilon^{4})$ samples we prove that the optimal policy corresponding to the recovered reward is $\varepsilon$-close to the expert policy in total variation distance.

@article{renard2025_2403.16829,
  title={ Convergence of a model-free entropy-regularized inverse reinforcement learning algorithm },
  author={ Titouan Renard and Andreas Schlaginhaufen and Tingting Ni and Maryam Kamgarpour },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.16829},
  year={ 2025 }
}