Paper ID: 2501.06376

On the Partial Identifiability in Reward Learning: Choosing the Best Reward

Filippo Lazzati, Alberto Maria Metelli

In Reward Learning (ReL), we are given feedback on an unknown *target reward*, and the goal is to use this information to find it. When the feedback is not informative enough, the target reward is only *partially identifiable*, i.e., there exists a set of rewards (the feasible set) that are equally-compatible with the feedback. In this paper, we show that there exists a choice of reward, non-necessarily contained in the feasible set that, *depending on the ReL application*, improves the performance w.r.t. selecting the reward arbitrarily among the feasible ones. To this aim, we introduce a new *quantitative framework* to analyze ReL problems in a simple yet expressive way. We exemplify the framework in a *reward transfer* use case, for which we devise three provably-efficient ReL algorithms.

Submitted: Jan 10, 2025