Imitation Learning by Reinforcement LearningDownload PDF

Published: 28 Jan 2022, Last Modified: 22 Oct 2023ICLR 2022 PosterReaders: Everyone
Keywords: reinforcement learning, imitation learning, Markov Decision Process, continuous control
Abstract: Imitation learning algorithms learn a policy from demonstrations of expert behavior. We show that, for deterministic experts, imitation learning can be done by reduction to reinforcement learning with a stationary reward. Our theoretical analysis both certifies the recovery of expert reward and bounds the total variation distance between the expert and the imitation learner, showing a link to adversarial imitation learning. We conduct experiments which confirm that our reduction works well in practice for continuous control tasks.
One-sentence Summary: For deterministic experts, you can do imitation learning by calling an RL solver once, with a stationary reward signal.
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