Non-Markovian Reward Modelling from Trajectory Labels via Interpretable Multiple Instance Learning

We generalise the problem of reward modelling (RM) for reinforcement learning (RL) to handle non-Markovian rewards. Existing work assumes that human evaluators observe each step in a trajectory independently when providing feedback on agent behaviour. In this work, we remove this assumption, extending RM to include hidden state information that captures temporal dependencies in human assessment of trajectories. We then show how RM can be approached as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem, and develop new MIL models that are able to capture the time dependencies in labelled trajectories. We demonstrate on a range of RL tasks that our novel MIL models can reconstruct reward functions to a high level of accuracy, and that they provide interpretable learnt hidden information that can be used to train high-performing agent policies.