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Title: Model-based imitation learning from state trajectories

Paper content:
Imitation learning from demonstrations usually relies on learning a policy from trajectories of optimal states and actions.
However, in real life expert demonstrations, often the action information is missing and only state trajectories are available.
We present a model-based imitation learning method that can learn environment-specific optimal actions only from expert state trajectories.
Our proposed method starts with a model-free reinforcement learning algorithm with a heuristic reward signal to sample environment dynamics, which is then used to train the state-transition probability.
Subsequently, we learn the optimal actions from expert state trajectories by supervised learning, while back-propagating the error gradients through the modeled environment dynamics.
Experimental evaluations show that our proposed method successfully achieves performance similar to (state, action) trajectory-based traditional imitation learning methods even in the absence of action information, with much fewer iterations compared to conventional model-free reinforcement learning methods.
We also demonstrate that our method can learn to act from only video demonstrations of expert agent for simple games and can learn to achieve desired performance in less number of iterations.
Reinforcement learning(RL) involves training an agent to learn a policy that accomplishes a certain task in an environment.
The objective of reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected future reward Sutton & Barto (1998) from a guiding signal.
BID11 showed that neural networks can be used to approximate state-action value functions used by an agent to perform discrete control based on a guiding reward.
This was demonstrated in Atari games where the score was used as the reward signal.
Similarly, continuous control of robotics arm was achieved by BID9 minimizing the distance between end-effector and target location.
Following these, other methods such as BID20 were proposed to improve the sample efficiency of modelfree algorithms with theoretical guarantees of policy improvement in each step.
These algorithms assume that a guiding reward signal is available for the agent to learn optimal behavior for a certain task.
However, in most cases of natural learning, such guiding signal is not present and learning is performed by imitating an expert behavior.Imitation learning involves copying the behavior of an expert agent to accomplish the desired task.
In the conventional imitation learning setting, a set of expert trajectories providing states and optimal actions τ = {s 0 , a 0 , s 1 , a 1 , ..., s n , a n ) performed by an expert agent π E are available but the reward (or cost function), r E (s, a) used to achieve the expert behavior is not available.
The goal is to learn a new policy π, which imitates the expert behavior by maximizing the likelihood of given demonstration trajectories.A straightforward way for imitation learning is to direct learn the optimal action to perform given the current state as proposed by Pomerleau (1991); BID2 .
The policy π can learn to imitate the expert behavior by maximizing likelihood of the condition distribution of action given states p(a|s).
This can be achieved by simply training a parameterized function (neural networks for instance) with state and action pairs from the expert trajectories.
Since this involves end-to-end supervised learning, training is much more sample-efficient compared to reinforcement learning and overcomes inherent problems in model-free methods such as credit assignment BID22 ).
However, since behavior cloning learns optimal action from a single state value only, it is unaware of the future state distribution the current action will produce.
Thus, errors are compounded in the future states leading to undesired agent behavior as shown by BID18 ; BID17 .
Therefore, numerous training samples are required for behavior cloning to reduce errors in action prediction required for satisfactory imitation learning.The second approach to imitation learning involves setting up exploration in a Markov Decision Process(MDP) setting.
The goal then is to recover a reward signal that best explains the expert trajectories.
BID12 first introduced Inverse Reinforcement Learning(IRL), where the goal is to find a reward signalr from the trajectories such that the expert is uniquely optimal.
After computing this estimated reward signal, usually, a model-free reinforcement learning performed to obtain the desired policy imitating the expert behavior by maximizing the expected discounted reward E π ( t γ tr (s t , a t )).
While this alleviates the problem of compounding errors as in behavior cloning, BID25 showed that estimating a unique reward function from state and action trajectories is an ill-posed problem.Following the success of Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) BID3 ) in various fields of machine learning, adversarial learning has also been shown incorporated in the imitation learning framework.
The recent work on Generative Adversarial Imitation Leaning or GAIL by BID4 showed that model-free reinforcement learning using the discriminator as a cost function can learn to imitate the expert agent with much less number of demonstrated trajectories compared to behavior cloning.
Following the success of GAIL, there have extensions by BID0 to model-based generative imitation learning using a differentiable dynamics model of the environment.
Robust imitation policy strategies using a combination of variational autoencoders BID7 ; BID16 ) and GAIL has also been proposed by BID23 .The
previous works assume that the expert trajectories consist of both action and state values from the optimal agent. However
, optimal actions are usually not available in real-world imitation learning. For example
, we often learn tasks like skipping, jump rope, gymnastics, etc. just by watching other expert humans perform the task. In this case
, the optimal expert trajectories only consist of visual input, in other words, the consecutive states of the expert human with no action information. We learn to
jump rope by trying to reproduce actions that result in state trajectories similar to the state trajectories observed from the expert. This requires
exploring the environment in a structured fashion to learn the dynamics of the rope (for jump rope) which then enables executing optimal actions to imitate the expert behavior. The recent work
of BID10 presents learning from observations only with focus to transferring skills learned from source domain to an unseen target domain, using rewards obtained by feature tracking for model-free reinforcement learning.Inspired by the above method of learning in humans, we present a principled way of learning to imitate an expert from state information only, with no action information available. We first learn
a distribution of the next state from the current state trajectory, used to estimate a heuristic reward signal enabling model-free exploration. The state, action
and next states information from modelfree exploration is used to learn a dynamics model of the environment. For the case of learning
in humans, this is similar to performing actions for replicating the witnessed expert state trajectories, which in turn gives information about the dynamics of the environment. Once this forward model
is learned, we try to find the action that maximizes the likelihood of next state. Since the forward model
gives a function approximation for the environment dynamics, we can back propagate errors through it to perform model-based policy update by end to end supervised learning. We demonstrate that our
proposed network can reach, with fewer iterations, the level close to an expert agent behavior (which is a pre-trained actor network or manually provided by humans), and compare it with reinforcement learning using a hand-crafted reward or a heuristics reward that is based on prediction error of next state learned from the optimal state trajectories of the expert.
We presented a model-based imitation learning method that can learn to act from expert state trajectories in the absence of action information.
Our method uses trajectories sampled from the modelfree policy exploration to train a dynamics model of the environment.
As model-free policy is enriched through time, the forward model can better approximate the actual environment dynamics, which leads to improved gradient flow, leading to better model-based policy update which is trained in a supervised fashion from expert state trajectories.
In the ideal case, when dynamics model perfectly approximates the environment, our proposed method is equivalent to behavior cloning, even in the absence of action information.
We demonstrate that the proposed method learns the desired policy in less number of iterations compared conventional model-free methods.
We also show that once the dynamics model is trained it can be used to transfer learning for other tasks in a similar environment in an end-to-end supervised manner.
Future work includes tighter integration of the model-based learning and the model-free learning for higher data efficiency by sharing information (1) between the model-free policy π mf and the model-based policy π mb and (2) between the next state predictor p(s t+1 |s t ) and the dynamics model p(s t+1 |s t , a t ) and (3) improving the limitations of compounding errors and requirement of large number of demonstration, by adversarial training which can maximize likelihood of future state distributions as well.

assistant: text: Learning to imitate an expert in the absence of optimal actions learning a dynamics model while exploring the environment.