Learning Efficient Planning-based Rewards for Imitation Learning

Xingrui Yu, Yueming Lyu, Ivor Tsang

Abstract: Imitation learning from limited demonstrations is challenging. Most inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) methods are unable to perform as good as the demonstrator, especially in a high-dimensional environment, e.g, the Atari domain. To address this challenge, we propose a novel reward learning method, which streamlines a differential planning module with dynamics modeling. Our method learns useful planning computations with a meaningful reward function that focuses on the resulting region of an agent executing an action. Such a planning-based reward function leads to policies with better generalization ability. Empirical results with multiple network architectures and reward instances show that our method can outperform state-of-the-art IRL methods on multiple Atari games and continuous control tasks. Our method achieves performance that is averagely 1,139.1% of the demonstration.

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