Abstract In this work, we introduce the fifirst approach to the Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) problem in relational domains. IRL has been used to recover a more compact representation of the expert policy leading to better generalization performances among different contexts. On the other hand, relational learning allows representing problems with a varying number of objects (potentially infifinite), thus provides more generalizable representations of problems and skills. We show how these different formalisms allow one to create a new IRL algorithm for relational domains that can recover with great effificiency rewards from expert data that have strong generalization and transfer properties. We evaluate our algorithm in representative tasks and study the impact of diverse experimental conditions such as : the number of demonstrations, knowledge about the dynamics, transfer among varying dimensions of a problem, and changing dynamics.