Supervised Reward Inference

Will Schwarzer, Jordan Jack Schneider, Philip S. Thomas, Scott Niekum; 7, 2026.

Presented at the Reinforcement Learning Conference (RLC), Montréal, Quebec, Canada, August 15–17, 2026.

Abstract

Existing approaches to reward inference typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific behavior models. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions that are suboptimal due to poor planning or execution to behaviors intended to communicate goals rather than achieve them. One existing solution for inferring rewards from such behavior – provided it is drawn from the same distribution at training and deployment – is to construct a dataset of behavior paired with known rewards, and to learn the mapping from behavior to rewards; however, prior methods in this family face notable limitations, such as restrictions to tabular settings. Given such a dataset, we propose instead that supervised learning offers a parsimonious yet powerful solution, which we term Supervised Reward Inference (SRI). Theoretically, we prove that SRI is asymptotically Bayes-optimal under standard assumptions. Empirically, SRI achieves near-ceiling performance on a prior benchmark for reward inference from suboptimal behavior, while on Meta-World robotics tasks, it infers rewards from even arbitrarily suboptimal demonstrations as accurately as those demonstrations allow. Finally, we demonstrate our framework's universality with straightforward generalizations to action- and goal-prediction.

[abs][pdf]

BibTeX

@article{schwarzer2026supervised,
    title={Supervised Reward Inference},
    author={Will Schwarzer and Jordan Jack Schneider and Philip S. Thomas and Scott Niekum},
    journal={Reinforcement Learning Journal},
    volume={7},
    pages={},
    year={2026}
}