Reward-free World Models for Online Imitation Learning

27 Sept 2024 (modified: 05 Feb 2025)Submitted to ICLR 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: World Models, Imitation Learning, Inverse Reinforcement Learning
TL;DR: We propose a novel approach to online imitation learning that leverages reward-free world models to solve complex tasks.
Abstract: Imitation learning (IL) enables agents to acquire skills directly from expert demonstrations, providing a compelling alternative to reinforcement learning. However, prior online IL approaches struggle with complex tasks characterized by high-dimensional inputs and complex dynamics. In this work, we propose a novel approach to online imitation learning that leverages reward-free world models. Our method learns environmental dynamics entirely in latent spaces without reconstruction, enabling efficient and accurate modeling. We adopt the inverse soft-Q learning objective, reformulating the optimization process in the Q-policy space to mitigate the instability associated with traditional optimization in reward-policy space. By employing a learned latent dynamics model and planning for control, our approach consistently achieves stable, expert-level performance in tasks with high-dimensional observation or action spaces and intricate dynamics. We evaluate our method on a diverse set of benchmarks, including DMControl, MyoSuite, and ManiSkill2, demonstrating superior empirical performance compared to existing approaches.
Primary Area: reinforcement learning
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Submission Number: 8939
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