Align Your Intents: Offline Imitation Learning via Optimal Transport

26 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Optimal Transport, Reinforcement Learning, Offline RL, Intention learning
TL;DR: Alignment of intentions enables an agent to learn from the expert, despite the absence of explicit rewards or action labels. New Offline RL SOTA.
Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) addresses the problem of sequential decision-making by learning optimal policy through pre-collected data, without interacting with the environment. As yet, it has remained somewhat impractical, because one rarely knows the reward explicitly and it is hard to distill it retrospectively. Here, we show that an imitating agent can still learn the desired behavior merely from observing the expert, despite the absence of explicit rewards or action labels. In our method, AILOT (Aligned Imitation Learning via Optimal Transport), we involve special representation of states in a form of intents that incorporate pairwise spatial distances within the data. Given such representations, we define intrinsic reward function via optimal transport distance between the expert's and the agent's trajectories. We report that AILOT outperforms state-of-the art offline imitation learning algorithms on D4RL benchmarks and improves the performance of other offline RL algorithms by dense reward relabelling in the sparse-reward tasks.
Supplementary Material: zip
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
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Submission Number: 7886
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