Visual Imitation with Reinforcement Learning using Recurrent Siamese Networks

Glen Berseth, Florian Golemo, Christopher Pal

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Imitation learning

Abstract: It would be desirable for a reinforcement learning (RL) based agent to learn behaviour by merely watching a demonstration. However, defining rewards that facilitate this goal within the RL paradigm remains a challenge. Here we address this problem with Siamese networks, trained to compute distances between observed behaviours and an agent's behaviours. We use an RNN-based comparator model to learn such distances in space and time between motion clips while training an RL policy to minimize this distance. Through experimentation, we have also found that the inclusion of multi-task data and an additional image encoding loss helps enforce temporal consistency and improve policy learning. These two components appear to balance reward for matching a specific instance of a behaviour versus that behaviour in general. Furthermore, we focus here on a particularly challenging form of this problem where only a single demonstration is provided for a given task -- the one-shot learning setting. We demonstrate our approach on humanoid, dog and raptor agents in 2D and a 3D quadruped and humanoid. In these environments, we show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art, GAIfO (i.e. GAIL without access to actions) and TCNs.

One-sentence Summary: Learning recurrent distance functions between videos to enable imitation learning from a single motion clip.

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