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Title: Sample Efficient Imitation Learning for Continuous Control

Paper content:
The goal of imitation learning (IL) is to enable a learner to imitate expert behavior given expert demonstrations.
Recently, generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) has shown significant progress on IL for complex continuous tasks.
However, GAIL and its extensions require a large number of environment interactions during training.
In real-world environments, the more an IL method requires the learner to interact with the environment for better imitation, the more training time it requires, and the more damage it causes to the environments and the learner itself.
We believe that IL algorithms could be more applicable to real-world problems if the number of interactions could be reduced.
In this paper, we propose a model-free IL algorithm for continuous control.
Our algorithm is made up mainly three changes to the existing adversarial imitation learning (AIL) methods –
(a) adopting off-policy actor-critic (Off-PAC) algorithm to optimize the learner policy,
(b) estimating the state-action value using off-policy samples without learning reward functions, and
(c) representing the stochastic policy function so that its outputs are bounded.
Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves competitive results with GAIL while significantly reducing the environment interactions.
Recent advances in reinforcement learning (RL) have achieved super-human performance on several domains BID20 BID21 .
On most of such domains with the success of RL, the design of reward, that explains what agent's behavior is favorable, is obvious for humans.
Conversely, on domains where it is unclear how to design the reward, agents trained by RL algorithms often obtain poor policies and behave worse than what we expect them to do.
Imitation learning (IL) comes in such cases.
The goal of IL is to enable the learner to imitate expert behavior given the expert demonstrations without the reward signal.
We are interested in IL because we desire an algorithm that can be applied to real-world problems for which it is often hard to design the reward.
In addition, since it is generally hard to model a variety of real-world environments with an algorithm, and the state-action pairs in a vast majority of realworld applications such as robotics control can be naturally represented in continuous spaces, we focus on model-free IL for continuous control.A wide variety of IL methods have been proposed in the last few decades.
The simplest IL method among those is behavioral cloning (BC) BID23 which learns an expert policy in a supervised fashion without environment interactions during training.
BC can be the first IL option when enough demonstration is available.
However, when only a limited number of demonstrations are available, BC often fails to imitate the expert behavior because of the problem which is referred to compounding error BID25 -inaccuracies compound over time and can lead the learner to encounter unseen states in the expert demonstrations.
Since it is often hard to obtain a large number of demonstrations in real-world environments, BC is often not the best choice for real-world IL scenarios.Another widely used approach, which overcomes the compounding error problem, is Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) BID27 BID22 BID0 BID33 .
Recently, BID15 have proposed generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) which is based on prior IRL works.
Since GAIL has achieved state-of-the-art performance on a variety of continuous control tasks, the adversarial IL (AIL) framework has become a popular choice for IL BID1 BID11 BID16 .
It is known that the AIL methods are more sample efficient than BC in terms of the expert demonstration.
However, as pointed out by BID15 , the existing AIL methods have sample complexity in terms of the environment interaction.
That is, even if enough demonstration is given by the expert before training the learner, the AIL methods require a large number of state-action pairs obtained through the interaction between the learner and the environment 1 .
The sample complexity keeps existing AIL from being employed to real-world applications for two reasons.
First, the more an AIL method requires the interactions, the more training time it requires.
Second, even if the expert safely demonstrated, the learner may have policies that damage the environments and the learner itself during training.
Hence, the more it performs the interactions, the more it raises the possibility of getting damaged.
For the real-world applications, we desire algorithms that can reduce the number of interactions while keeping the imitation capability satisfied as well as the existing AIL methods do.The following three properties of the existing AIL methods which may cause the sample complexity in terms of the environment interactions:(a
) Adopting on-policy RL methods which fundamentally have sample complexity in terms of the environment interactions.(b
) Alternating three optimization processes -learning reward functions, value estimation with learned reward functions, and RL to update the learner policy using the estimated value. In
general, as the number of parameterized functions which are related to each other increases, the training progress may be unstable or slower, and thus more interactions may be performed during training.(c)
Adopting Gaussian policy as the learner's stochastic policy, which has infinite support on a continuous action space. In
common IL settings, we observe action space of the expert policy from the demonstration where the expert action can take on values within a bounded (finite) interval. As
BID3 suggests, the policy which can select actions outside the bound may slow down the training progress and make the problem harder to solve, and thus more interactions may be performed during training.In this paper, we propose an IL algorithm for continuous control to improve the sample complexity of the existing AIL methods. Our
algorithm is made up mainly three changes to the existing AIL methods as follows:(a)
Adopting off-policy actor-critic (Off-PAC) algorithm BID5 to optimize the learner policy instead of on-policy RL algorithms. Off-policy
learning is commonly known as the promising approach to improve the complexity.(b) Estimating
the state-action value using off-policy samples without learning reward functions instead of using on-policy samples with the learned reward functions. Omitting the reward
learning reduces functions to be optimized. It is expected to make
training progress stable and faster and thus reduce the number of interactions during training.(c) Representing the stochastic
policy function of which outputs are bounded instead of adopting Gaussian policy. Bounding action values may make
the problem easier to solve and make the training faster, and thus reduce the number of interactions during training.Experimental results show that our algorithm enables the learner to imitate the expert behavior as well as GAIL does while significantly reducing the environment interactions. Ablation experimental results show
that (a) adopting the off-policy scheme
requires about 100 times fewer environment interactions to imitate the expert behavior than the one on-policy IL algorithms require, (b) omitting the reward learning makes
the training stable and faster, and (c) bounding action values makes the training
faster.
In this paper, we proposed a model-free IL algorithm for continuous control.
Experimental results showed that our algorithm achieves competitive performance with GAIL while significantly reducing the environment interactions.A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF EXPERIMENT TAB0 summarizes the description of each task, the performance of an agent with random policy, and the performance of the experts.

assistant: text: In this paper, we proposed a model-free, off-policy IL algorithm for continuous control. Experimental results showed that our algorithm achieves competitive results with GAIL while significantly reducing the environment interactions.