Multi-agent learning is a promising method to simulate aggregate competitive behaviour in finance. Learning expert agents' reward functions through their external demonstrations is hence particularly relevant for subsequent design of realistic agent-based simulations. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) aims at acquiring such reward functions through inference, allowing to generalize the resulting policy to states not observed in the past. This paper investigates whether IRL can infer such rewards from agents within real financial stochastic environments: limit order books (LOB). We introduce a simple one-level LOB, where the interactions of a number of stochastic agents and an expert trading agent are modelled as a Markov decision process. We consider two cases for the expert's reward: either a simple linear function of state features; or a complex, more realistic non-linear function. Given the expert agent's demonstrations, we attempt to discover their strategy by modelling their latent reward function using linear and Gaussian process (GP) regressors from previous literature, and our own approach through Bayesian neural networks (BNN). While the three methods can learn the linear case, only the GP-based and our proposed BNN methods are able to discover the non-linear reward case. Our BNN IRL algorithm outperforms the other two approaches as the number of samples increases. These results illustrate that complex behaviours, induced by non-linear reward functions amid agent-based stochastic scenarios, can be deduced through inference, encouraging the use of inverse reinforcement learning for opponent-modelling in multi-agent systems.

本研究探讨了IRL是否能从金融随机环境（LOB）中的代理中推断出奖励，并使用先前的线性和高斯过程回归器以及自己的方法通过贝叶斯神经网络（BNN）来模拟其潜在奖励函数，说明非线性奖励函数产生的复杂行为可以通过推断来推断。

针对限价订单簿动态的逆强化学习研究