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Title: Variational Discriminator Bottleneck: Improving Imitation Learning, Inverse RL, and GANs by Constraining Information Flow

Paper content:
Adversarial learning methods have been proposed for a wide range of applications, but the training of adversarial models can be notoriously unstable.
Effectively balancing the performance of the generator and discriminator is critical, since a discriminator that achieves very high accuracy will produce relatively uninformative gradients.
In this work, we propose a simple and general technique to constrain information flow in the discriminator by means of an information bottleneck.
By enforcing a constraint on the mutual information between the observations and the discriminator's internal representation, we can effectively modulate the discriminator's accuracy and maintain useful and informative gradients.
We demonstrate that our proposed variational discriminator bottleneck (VDB) leads to significant improvements across three distinct application areas for adversarial learning algorithms.
Our primary evaluation studies the applicability of the VDB to imitation learning of dynamic continuous control skills, such as running.
We show that our method can learn such skills directly from raw video demonstrations, substantially outperforming prior adversarial imitation learning methods.
The VDB can also be combined with adversarial inverse reinforcement learning to learn parsimonious reward functions that can be transferred and re-optimized in new settings.
Finally, we demonstrate that VDB can train GANs more effectively for image generation, improving upon a number of prior stabilization methods.
Adversarial learning methods provide a promising approach to modeling distributions over highdimensional data with complex internal correlation structures.
These methods generally use a discriminator to supervise the training of a generator in order to produce samples that are indistinguishable from the data.
A particular instantiation is generative adversarial networks, which can be used for high-fidelity generation of images BID21 and other highdimensional data BID45 BID46 BID9 .
Adversarial methods can also be used to learn reward functions in the framework of inverse reinforcement learning BID10 BID12 , or to directly imitate demonstrations BID19 .
However, they suffer from major optimization challenges, one of which is balancing the performance of the generator and discriminator.
A discriminator that achieves very high accuracy can produce relatively uninformative gradients, but a weak discriminator can also hamper the generator's ability to learn.
These challenges have led to widespread interest in a variety of stabilization methods for adversarial learning algorithms BID24 BID4 .In
this work, we propose a simple regularization technique for adversarial learning, which constrains the information flow from the inputs to the discriminator using a variational approximation to the information bottleneck. By
enforcing a constraint on the mutual information between the input observations and the discriminator's internal representation, we can encourage the discriminator to learn a representation that has heavy overlap between the data and the generator's distribution, thereby effectively modulating the discriminator's accuracy and maintaining useful and informative gradients for the generator. Our
approach to stabilizing adversarial learning can be viewed as an adaptive variant of instance noise BID39 . However
, we show that the adaptive nature of this method is critical. Constraining
the mutual information between the discriminator's internal representation and the input allows the regularizer to directly limit the discriminator's accuracy, which automates the choice of noise magnitude and applies this noise to a compressed representation of the input that is specifically optimized to model the most discerning differences between the generator and data distributions.The main contribution of this work is the variational discriminator bottleneck (VDB), an adaptive stochastic regularization method for adversarial learning that substantially improves performance across a range of different application domains, examples of which are available in FIG0 . Our method can
be easily applied to a variety of tasks and architectures. First, we evaluate
our method on a suite of challenging imitation tasks, including learning highly acrobatic skills from mocap data with a simulated humanoid character. Our method also enables
characters to learn dynamic continuous control skills directly from raw video demonstrations, and drastically improves upon previous work that uses adversarial imitation learning. We further evaluate the
effectiveness of the technique for inverse reinforcement learning, which recovers a reward function from demonstrations in order to train future policies. Finally, we apply our framework
to image generation using generative adversarial networks, where employing VDB improves the performance in many cases.
To interpret the effects of the VDB, we consider the results presented by , which show that for two distributions with disjoint support, the optimal discriminator can perfectly classify all samples and its gradients will be zero almost everywhere.
Thus, as the discriminator converges to the optimum, the gradients for the generator vanishes accordingly.
To address this issue, proposed applying continuous noise to the discriminator inputs, thereby ensuring that the distributions have continuous support everywhere.
In practice, if the original distributions are sufficiently distant from each other, the added noise will have negligible effects.
As shown by , the optimal choice for the variance of the noise to ensure convergence can be quite delicate.
In our method, by first using a learned encoder to map the inputs to an embedding and then applying an information bottleneck on the embedding, we can dynamically adjust the variance of the noise such that the distributions not only share support in the embedding space, but also have significant overlap.
Since the minimum amount of information required for binary classification is 1 bit, by selecting an information constraint I c < 1, the discriminator is prevented from from perfectly differentiating between the distributions.
To illustrate the effects of the VDB, we consider a simple task of training a discriminator to differentiate between two Gaussian distributions.
FIG1 visualizes the decision boundaries learned with different bounds I c on the mutual information.
Without a VDB, the discriminator learns a sharp decision boundary, resulting in vanishing gradients for much of the space.
But as I c decreases and the bound tightens, the decision boundary is smoothed, providing more informative gradients that can be leveraged by the generator.Taking this analysis further, we can extend Theorem 3.2 from to analyze the VDB, and show that the gradient of the generator will be non-degenerate for a small enough constraint I c , under some additional simplifying assumptions.
The result in states that the gradient consists of vectors that point toward samples on the data manifold, multiplied by coefficients that depend on the noise.
However, these coefficients may be arbitrarily small if the generated samples are far from real samples, and the noise is not large enough.
This can still cause the generator gradient to vanish.
In the case of the VDB, the constraint ensures that these coefficients are always bounded below.
Due to space constraints, this result is presented in Appendix A.
We present the variational discriminator bottleneck, a general regularization technique for adversarial learning.
Our experiments show that the VDB is broadly applicable to a variety of domains, and yields significant improvements over previous techniques on a number of challenging tasks.
While our experiments have produced promising results for video imitation, the results have been primarily with videos of synthetic scenes.
We believe that extending the technique to imitating realworld videos is an exciting direction.
Another exciting direction for future work is a more in-depth theoretical analysis of the method, to derive convergence and stability results or conditions.

assistant: text: Regularizing adversarial learning with an information bottleneck, applied to imitation learning, inverse reinforcement learning, and generative adversarial networks.