Student-Informed Teacher Training

Nico Messikommer, Jiaxu Xing, Elie Aljalbout, Davide Scaramuzza

Keywords: Imitation learning, Student-Teacher, Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR: We learn a student-teacher imitation learning framework, where the teacher is pushed to learn behaviors that the student is capable of imitating based on its limited observability.

Abstract: Imitation learning with a privileged teacher has proven effective for learning complex control behaviors from high-dimensional inputs, such as images. In this framework, a teacher is trained with privileged task information, while a student tries to predict the actions of the teacher with more limited observations, e.g., in a robot navigation task, the teacher might have access to distances to nearby obstacles, while the student only receives visual observations of the scene. However, privileged imitation learning faces a key challenge: the student might be unable to imitate the teacher's behavior due to partial observability. This problem arises because the teacher is trained without considering if the student is capable of imitating the learned behavior. To address this teacher-student asymmetry, we propose a framework for joint training of the teacher and student policies, encouraging the teacher to learn behaviors that can be imitated by the student despite the latters' limited access to information and its partial observability.

Submission Number: 20