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Title: Adversarial Imitation via Variational Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Paper content:
We consider a problem of learning the reward and policy from expert examples under unknown dynamics.
Our proposed method builds on the framework of generative adversarial networks and introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy inverse reinforcement learning to learn near-optimal rewards and policies.
Empowerment-based regularization prevents the policy from overfitting to expert demonstrations, which advantageously leads to more generalized behaviors that result in learning near-optimal rewards.
Our method simultaneously learns empowerment through variational information maximization along with the reward and policy under the adversarial learning formulation.
We evaluate our approach on various high-dimensional complex control tasks.
We also test our learned rewards in challenging transfer learning problems where training and testing environments are made to be different from each other in terms of dynamics or structure.
The results show that our proposed method not only learns near-optimal rewards and policies that are matching expert behavior but also performs significantly better than state-of-the-art inverse reinforcement learning algorithms.
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising tool for solving complex decision-making and control tasks from predefined high-level reward functions BID23 .
However, defining an optimizable reward function that inculcates the desired behavior can be challenging for many robotic applications, which include learning social-interaction skills BID17 , dexterous manipulation BID5 , and autonomous driving BID10 .Inverse
reinforcement learning (IRL) BID14 addresses the problem of learning reward functions from expert demonstrations, and it is often considered as a branch of imitation learning BID2 ). The prior
work in IRL includes maximum-margin BID0 BID18 and maximum-entropy BID24 formulations. Currently
, maximum entropy (MaxEnt) IRL is a widely used approach towards IRL, and has been extended to use non-linear function approximators such as neural networks in scenarios with unknown dynamics by leveraging sampling-based techniques BID3 BID5 BID9 . However,
designing the IRL algorithm is usually complicated as it requires, to some extent, hand engineering such as deciding domain-specific regularizers BID5 .Rather than
learning reward functions and solving the IRL problem, imitation learning (IL) learns a policy directly from expert demonstrations. Prior work
addressed the IL problem through behavior cloning (BC), which learns a policy from expert trajectories using supervised learning BID15 . Although BC
methods are simple solutions to IL, these methods require a large amount of data because of compounding errors induced by covariate shift BID19 . To overcome
BC limitations, a generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) algorithm BID8 was proposed. GAIL uses the
formulation of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) BID7 , i.e., a generator-discriminator framework, where a generator is trained to generate expert-like trajectories while a discriminator is trained to distinguish between generated and expert trajectories. Although GAIL
is highly effective and efficient framework, it does not recover transferable/portable reward functions along with the policies, thus narrowing its use cases to similar problem instances in similar environments. Reward function
learning is ultimately preferable, if possible, over direct imitation learning as rewards are portable functions that represent the most basic and complete representation of agent intention, and can be re-optimized in new environments and new agents.Reward learning is challenging as there can be many optimal policies explaining a set of demonstrations and many reward functions inducing an optimal policy BID14 BID24 . Recently, an adversarial
inverse reinforcement learning (AIRL) framework BID6 , an extension of GAIL, was proposed that offers a solution to the former issue by exploiting the maximum entropy IRL method BID24 whereas the latter issue is addressed through learning disentangled reward functions by modeling the reward as a function of state only instead of both state and action. However, AIRL fails to recover
the ground truth reward when the ground truth reward is a function of both state and action. For example, the reward function
in any locomotion or ambulation tasks contains a penalty term that discourages actions with large magnitudes. This need for action regularization
is well known in optimal control literature and limits the use cases of a state-only reward function in most practical real-life applications. A more generalizable and useful approach
would be to formulate reward as a function of both states and actions, which induces action-driven reward shaping that has been shown to play a vital role in quickly recovering the optimal policies BID13 .In this paper, we propose the empowerment-regularized
adversarial inverse reinforcement learning (EAIRL) algorithm 1 . Empowerment BID20 ) is a mutual information-based theoretic
measure, like state-or action-value functions, that assigns a value to a given state to quantify the extent to which an agent can influence its environment. Our method uses variational information maximization BID12
to learn empowerment in parallel to learning the reward and policy from expert data. Empowerment acts as a regularizer to policy updates to prevent
overfitting the expert demonstrations, which in practice leads to learning robust rewards. Our experimentation shows that the proposed method recovers not
only near-optimal policies but also recovers robust, transferable, disentangled, state-action based reward functions that are near-optimal. The results on reward learning also show that EAIRL outperforms
several state-of-the-art IRL methods by recovering reward functions that leads to optimal, expert-matching behaviors. On policy learning, results demonstrate that policies learned through
EAIRL perform comparably to GAIL and AIRL with non-disentangled (state-action) reward function but significantly outperform policies learned through AIRL with disentangled reward (state-only) and GAN interpretation of Guided Cost Learning (GAN-GCL) BID4 .
This section highlights the importance of empowerment-regularized MaxEnt-IRL and modeling rewards as a function of both state and action rather than restricting to state-only formulation on learning rewards and policies from expert demonstrations.In the scalable MaxEnt-IRL framework BID4 BID6 , the normalization term is approximated by importance sampling where the importance-sampler/policy is trained to minimize the KL-divergence from the distribution over expert trajectories.
However, merely minimizing the divergence between expert demonstrations and policy-generated samples leads to localized policy behavior which hinders learning generalized reward functions.
In our proposed work, we regularize the policy update with empowerment i.e., we update our policy to reduce the divergence from expert data distribution as well as to maximize the empowerment (Eqn.12).
The proposed regularization prevents premature convergence to local behavior which leads to robust state-action based rewards learning.
Furthermore, empowerment quantifies the extent to which an agent can control/influence its environment in the given state.
Thus the agent takes an action a on observing a state s such that it has maximum control/influence over the environment upon ending up in the future state s .Our
experimentation also shows the importance of modeling discriminator/reward functions as a function of both state and action in reward and policy learning under GANs framework. The
re-ward learning results show that state-only rewards (AIRL(s)) does not recover the action dependent terms of the ground-truth reward function that penalizes high torques. Therefore
, the agent shows aggressive behavior and sometimes flips over after few steps (see the accompanying video), which is also the reason that crippled-ant trained with AIRL's disentangled reward function reaches only the half-way to expert scores as shown in TAB0 . Therefore
, the reward formulation as a function of both states and actions is crucial to learning action-dependent terms required in most real-world applications, including any autonomous driving, robot locomotion or manipulation task where large torque magnitudes are discouraged or are dangerous. The policy
learning results further validate the importance of the state-action reward formulation. TAB2 shows
that methods with state-action reward/discriminator formulation can successfully recover expert-like policies. Hence, our
empirical results show that it is crucial to model reward/discriminator as a function of state-action as otherwise, adversarial imitation learning fails to learn ground-truth rewards and expert-like policies from expert data.
We present an approach to adversarial reward and policy learning from expert demonstrations by regularizing the maximum-entropy inverse reinforcement learning through empowerment.
Our method learns the empowerment through variational information maximization in parallel to learning the reward and policy.
We show that our policy is trained to imitate the expert behavior as well to maximize the empowerment of the agent over the environment.
The proposed regularization prevents premature convergence to local behavior and leads to a generalized policy that in turn guides the reward-learning process to recover near-optimal reward.
We show that our method successfully learns near-optimal rewards, policies, and performs significantly better than state-of-the-art IRL methods in both imitation learning and challenging transfer learning problems.
The learned rewards are shown to be transferable to environments that are dynamically or structurally different from training environments.In our future work, we plan to extend our method to learn rewards and policies from diverse human/expert demonstrations as the proposed method assumes that a single expert generates the training data.
Another exciting direction would be to build an algorithm that learns from sub-optimal demonstrations that contains both optimal and non-optimal behaviors.

assistant: text: Our method introduces the empowerment-regularized maximum-entropy inverse reinforcement learning to learn near-optimal rewards and policies from expert demonstrations.