Uncertainty-Aware Policy Sampling and Mixing for Safe Interactive Imitation Learning

Manfred Diaz, Thomas Fevens, Liam Paull

Abstract: Teaching robots how to execute tasks through demonstrations is appealing since it sidesteps the need to explicitly specify a reward function. However, posing imitation learning as a simple supervised learning problem suffers from the well-known problem of distributional shift - the teacher will only demonstrate the optimal trajectory and therefore the learner is unable to recover if it deviates even slightly from this trajectory since it has no training data for this case. This problem has been overcome in the literature by some element of interactivity in the learning process - usually be somehow interleaving the execution of the learner and the teacher so that the teacher can demonstrate to the learner also how to recover from mistakes. In this paper, we consider the cases where the robot has the potential to do harm, and therefore safety must be imposed at every step in the learning process. We show that uncertainty is an appropriate measure of safety and that both the mixing of the policies and the data sampling procedure benefit from considering the uncertainty of both the learner and the teacher. Our method, uncertainty-aware policy sampling and mixing (UPMS), is used to teach an agent to drive down a lane with less safety violations and less queries to the teacher than state-of-the-art methods.