Integrating AIRL-Based Reward Estimation into a Control Method Using Fuzzy Inference and Policy Gradient

Reinforcement learning (RL) often struggles in real-world tasks with high-dimensional state spaces and long horizons, where sparse or fixed rewards severely slow down exploration and cause agents to get trapped in local optima. This paper presents a fuzzy logic based reward shaping method that integrates human intuition into RL reward design. By encoding expert knowledge into adaptive and interpreable terms, fuzzy rules promote stable learning and reduce sensitivity to hyperparameters. The proposed method leverages these properties to adapt reward contributions based on the agent state, enabling smoother transitions between fast motion and precise control in challenging navigation tasks. Extensive simulation results on autonomous drone racing benchmarks show stable learning behavior and consistent task performance across scenarios of increasing difficulty. The proposed method achieves faster convergence and reduced performance variability across training seeds in more challenging environments, with success rates improving by up to approximately 5 percent compared to non fuzzy reward formulations.

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims to recover a reward function that explains expert demonstrations. Existing IRL methods typically rely on a bi-level optimization procedure that alternates between reward learning and policy optimization, leading to substantial computational burden and training instability. In this work, we introduce a different route that eliminates policy optimization entirely by leveraging diffusion policies. Our key insight is that a diffusion policy encodes the action-gradient structure of the optimal soft Q function, enabling reward learning to be cast as a sequence of value recovery problems, thereby allowing us to bypass reward-policy loops inherent in prior IRL methods. Specifically, our method proceeds in three stages: (I) recovering the optimal soft Q function via action-gradient matching and estimating the corresponding soft value function (LogSumExp of Q values) in a way inspired by Gumbel regression; (II) calibrating these soft values by inferring a state-dependent offset; (III) extracting the reward by enforcing Bellman consistency. This leads to Loop-Free Inverse Reinforcement Learning (LFIRL), a fully offline algorithm that operates in a simple, loop-free, and sequential manner. LFIRL is simple to implement and significantly improves training efficiency while maintaining strong reward recovery performance. Empirically, across Maze, Franka Kitchen, Adroit Hand Pen, and Push-T benchmarks, LFIRL achieves 2-3x speedup over the fastest baselines, while matching or surpassing state-of-the-art methods in reward recovery quality.

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is typically formulated as maximizing entropy subject to matching the distribution of expert trajectories. Classical (dual-ascent) IRL guarantees monotonic performance improvement but requires fully solving an RL problem each iteration to compute dual gradients. More recent adversarial methods avoid this cost at the expense of stability and monotonic dual improvement, by directly optimizing the primal problem and using a discriminator to provide rewards. In this work, we bridge the gap between these approaches by enabling monotonic improvement of the reward function and policy without having to fully solve an RL problem at every iteration. Our key theoretical insight is that a trust-region-optimal policy for a reward function update can be globally optimal for a smaller update in the same direction. This smaller update allows us to explicitly optimize the dual objective while only relying on a local search around the current policy. In doing so, our approach avoids the training instabilities of adversarial methods, offers monotonic performance improvement, and learns a reward function in the traditional sense of IRL--one that can be globally optimized to match expert demonstrations. Our proposed algorithm, Trust Region Inverse Reinforcement Learning (TRIRL), outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods across multiple challenging tasks by a factor of 2.4x in terms of aggregate inter-quartile mean, while recovering reward functions that generalize to system dynamics shifts.