Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) seeks to infer the latent reward function and the associated optimal policy from expert demonstrations. However, most current IRL methods assume centralized access to all trajectory data, which is impractical in real-world scenarios characterized by decentralized data sources and privacy concerns. To this end, this article proposes a novel algorithm for federated maximum-likelihood IRL (F-ML-IRL) and provides a rigorous analysis of its convergence rate. The proposed F-ML-IRL leverages dual aggregation to update the shared global model and performs bi-level local updates: an upper level learning task to optimize the parameterized reward function by maximizing the discounted likelihood of observing human expert trajectories under the current policy, and a lower level learning task to find the optimal agent policy regarding the entropy-regularized discounted cumulative reward under the current reward function. We analyze the convergence rate of the proposed F-ML-IRL algorithm and show that the global model in F-ML-IRL converges to a stationary point for both the reward and policy parameters within finite time. That is, the log-distance between the recovered policy and the optimal policy, as well as the gradient of the likelihood objective, converges to zero. Evaluating our F-ML-IRL algorithm on high-dimensional robotic control tasks in MuJoCo, we show that it ensures convergence of the recovered reward in decentralized learning and outperforms centralized baselines due to its ability to utilize distributed data-attaining better recovered rewards than all baselines in 12 out of 20 tasks.
Jiang et al. (2026) studied this question.