2019

Imitation Learning as $f$-Divergence Minimization

Ke, Liyiming, Choudhury, Sanjiban, Barnes, Matt et al.

Understand

We address the problem of imitation learning with multi-modal demonstrations.

  • Instead of attempting to learn all modes, we argue that in many tasks it is sufficient to imitate any one of them.
  • We show that the state-of-the-art methods such as GAIL and behavior cloning, due to their choice of loss function, often incorrectly interpolate between such modes.
  • Our key insight is to minimize the right divergence between the learner and the expert state-action distributions, namely the reverse KL divergence or I-projection.

Reading the bibliography…