DemoDICE: Offline Imitation Learning with Supplementary Imperfect Demonstrations

Geon-Hyeong Kim, Seokin Seo, Jongmin Lee, Wonseok Jeon, HyeongJoo Hwang, Hongseok Yang, Kee-Eung Kim

Keywords: imitation learning, offline imitation learning, imperfect demonstration, non-expert demonstration

Abstract: We consider offline imitation learning (IL), which aims to mimic the expert's behavior from its demonstration without further interaction with the environment. One of the main challenges in offline IL is to deal with the narrow support of the data distribution exhibited by the expert demonstrations that cover only a small fraction of the state and the action spaces. As a result, offline IL algorithms that rely only on expert demonstrations are very unstable since the situation easily deviates from those in the expert demonstrations. In this paper, we assume additional demonstration data of unknown degrees of optimality, which we call imperfect demonstrations. Under this setting, we propose DemoDICE, which effectively utilizes imperfect demonstrations by matching the stationary distribution of a policy with experts' distribution while penalizing its deviation from the overall demonstrations. Compared with the recent IL algorithms that adopt adversarial minimax training objectives, we substantially stabilize overall learning process by reducing minimax optimization to a direct convex optimization in a principled manner. Using extensive tasks, we show that DemoDICE achieves promising results in the offline IL from expert and imperfect demonstrations.