Augmenting GAIL with BC for sample efficient imitation learning

Understand

Imitation learning is the problem of recovering an expert policy without access to a reward signal.

• Behavior cloning and GAIL are two widely used methods for performing imitation learning.
• Behavior cloning converges in a few iterations but doesn't achieve peak performance due to its inherent iid assumption about the state-action distribution.
• GAIL addresses the issue by accounting for the temporal dependencies when performing a state distribution matching between the agent and the expert.