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Title: VILD: Variational Imitation Learning with Diverse-quality Demonstrations

Paper content:
The goal of imitation learning (IL) is to learn a good policy from high-quality demonstrations.
However, the quality of demonstrations in reality can be diverse, since it is easier and cheaper to collect demonstrations from a mix of experts and amateurs.
IL in such situations can be challenging, especially when the level of demonstrators' expertise is unknown.
We propose a new IL paradigm called Variational Imitation Learning with Diverse-quality demonstrations (VILD), where we explicitly model the level of demonstrators' expertise with a probabilistic graphical model and estimate it along with a reward function.
We show that a naive estimation approach is not suitable to large state and action spaces, and fix this issue by using a variational approach that can be easily implemented using existing reinforcement learning methods.
Experiments on continuous-control benchmarks demonstrate that VILD outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
Our work enables scalable and data-efficient IL under more realistic settings than before.
The goal of sequential decision making is to learn a policy that makes good decisions (Puterman, 1994) .
As an important branch of sequential decision making, imitation learning (IL) (Schaal, 1999) aims to learn such a policy from demonstrations (i.e., sequences of decisions) collected from experts.
However, high-quality demonstrations can be difficult to obtain in reality, since such experts may not always be available and sometimes are too costly (Osa et al., 2018) .
This is especially true when the quality of decisions depends on specific domain-knowledge not typically available to amateurs; e.g., in applications such as robot control (Osa et al., 2018) and autonomous driving (Silver et al., 2012) .
In practice, demonstrations are often diverse in quality, since it is cheaper to collect demonstrations from mixed demonstrators, containing both experts and amateurs (Audiffren et al., 2015) .
Unfortunately, IL in such settings tends to perform poorly, since low-quality demonstrations often negatively affect the performance of IL methods (Shiarlis et al., 2016) .
For example, amateurs' demonstrations for robotics can be cheaply collected via a robot simulation (Mandlekar et al., 2018 ), but such demonstrations may cause damages to the robot which is catastrophic in the real-world (Shiarlis et al., 2016) .
Similarly, demonstrations for autonomous driving can be collected from drivers in public roads (Fridman et al., 2017) , which may contain traffic-accident demonstrations.
Learning a self-driving car from these low-quality demonstrations may cause traffic accidents.
When the level of demonstrators' expertise is known, multi-modal IL (MM-IL) can be used to learn a good policy with diverse-quality demonstrations Hausman et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017) .
Specifically, MM-IL aims to learn a multi-modal policy, where each mode of the policy represents the decision making of each demonstrator.
When knowing the level of demonstrators' expertise, good policies can be obtained by selecting modes that correspond to the decision making of high-expertise demonstrators.
However, in practice, it is difficult to truly determine the level of demonstrators' expertise beforehand.
Without knowing the level of expertise, it is difficult to distinguish the decision making of experts and amateurs, and learning a good policy is challenging.
To overcome the issue of MM-IL, pioneer works have proposed to estimate the quality of each demonstration using auxiliary information from experts (Audiffren et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2019; Brown et al., 2019) .
Specifically, Audiffren et al. (2015) inferred the demonstration quality using similarities between diverse-quality demonstrations and high-quality demonstrations, where the latter are collected in a small number from experts.
In contrast, Wu et al. (2019) proposed to estimate the demonstration quality using a small number of demonstrations with confidence scores.
Namely, the score value given by an expert is proportion to the demonstration quality.
Similarly, the demonstration quality can be estimated by ranked demonstrations, where ranking from an expert is evaluated due to the relative quality (Brown et al., 2019) .
To sum up, these methods rely on auxiliary information from experts, namely high-quality demonstrations, confidence scores, and ranking.
In practice, these pieces of information can be scarce or noisy, which leads to a poor performance of these methods.
In this paper, we consider a novel but realistic setting of IL where only diverse-quality demonstrations are available.
Meanwhile, the level of demonstrators' expertise and auxiliary information from experts are fully absent.
To tackle this challenging setting, we propose a new learning paradigm called variational imitation learning with diverse-quality demonstrations (VILD).
The central idea of VILD is to model the level of demonstrators' expertise via a probabilistic graphical model, and learn it along with a reward function that represents an intention of expert's decision making.
To scale up our model for large state and action spaces, we leverage the variational approach (Jordan et al., 1999) , which can be implemented using reinforcement learning (RL) for flexibility (Sutton & Barto, 1998) .
To further improve data-efficiency of VILD when learning the reward function, we utilize importance sampling (IS) to re-weight a sampling distribution according to the estimated level of demonstrators' expertise.
Experiments on continuous-control benchmarks and real-world crowdsourced demonstrations (Mandlekar et al., 2018) denote that:
1) VILD is robust against diverse-quality demonstrations and outperforms existing methods significantly.
2) VILD with IS is data-efficient, since it learns the policy using a less number of transition samples.
In this paper, we explored a practical setting in IL where demonstrations have diverse-quality.
We showed the deficiency of existing methods, and proposed a robust method called VILD, which learns both the reward function and the level of demonstrators' expertise by using the variational approach.
Empirical results demonstrated that our work enables scalable and data-efficient IL under this practical setting.
In future, we will explore other approaches to efficiently estimate parameters of the proposed model except the variational approach.
We will also explore approaches to handle model misspecification, i.e., scenarios where the noisy policy differs from the model p ω .
Specifically, we will explore more flexible models of p ω such as neural networks, as well as using the tempered posterior approach (Grünwald & van Ommen, 2017) to improve robustness of our model.

assistant: text: We propose an imitation learning method to learn from diverse-quality demonstrations collected by demonstrators with different level of expertise.