# Learning to Optimize via Wasserstein Deep Inverse Optimal Control

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1805.08395 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.08395/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 May 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Wasserstein Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08113/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the inverse optimal control problem in social sciences: we aim at learning a user's true cost function from the observed temporal behavior. In contrast to traditional phenomenological works that aim to learn a generative model to fit the behavioral data, we propose a novel variational principle and treat user as a reinforcement learning algorithm, which acts by optimizing his cost function. We first propose a unified KL framework that generalizes existing maximum entropy inverse optimal control methods. We further propose a two-step Wasserstein inverse optimal control framework. In the first step, we compute the optimal measure with a novel mass transport equation. In the second step, we formulate the learning problem as a generative adversarial network. In two real world experiments - recommender systems and social networks, we show that our framework obtains significant performance gains over both existing inverse optimal control methods and point process based generative models.