{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/active-inverse-reward-design","title":"Active Inverse Reward Design","arxiv_id":"1809.03060","date":"2018-09-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sören Mindermann","Rohin Shah","Adam Gleave","Dylan Hadfield-Menell"],"abstract":"Designers of AI agents often iterate on the reward function in a trial-and-error process until they get the desired behavior, but this only guarantees good behavior in the training environment. We propose structuring this process as a series of queries asking the user to compare between different reward functions. Thus we can actively select queries for maximum informativeness about the true reward. In contrast to approaches asking the designer for optimal behavior, this allows us to gather additional information by eliciting preferences between suboptimal behaviors. After each query, we need to update the posterior over the true reward function from observing the proxy reward function chosen by the designer. The recently proposed Inverse Reward Design (IRD) enables this. Our approach substantially outperforms IRD in test environments. In particular, it can query the designer about interpretable, linear reward functions and still infer non-linear ones.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.03060v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1809.03060v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"active-inverse-reward-design","repo_url":"https://github.com/pliam1105/RBAIRD","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"informativeness","task_name":"Informativeness"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1809.03060","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1809.03060"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/pliam1105/RBAIRD","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"424bd9d5570fa0a7","entry":"pprint","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"424bd9d5570fa0a7"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}