In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

Learning to imitate expert behavior from demonstrations can be challenging, especially in environments with high-dimensional, continuous observations and unknown dynamics. Supervised learning methods based on behavioral cloning (BC) suffer from distribution shift: because the agent greedily imitates demonstrated actions, it can drift away from demonstrated states due to error accumulation. Recent methods based on reinforcement learning (RL), such as inverse RL and generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL), overcome this issue by training an RL agent to match the demonstrations over a long horizon. Since the true reward function for the task is unknown, these methods learn a reward function from the demonstrations, often using complex and brittle approximation techniques that involve adversarial training. We propose a simple alternative that still uses RL, but does not require learning a reward function. The key idea is to provide the agent with an incentive to match the demonstrations over a long horizon, by encouraging it to return to demonstrated states upon encountering new, out-of-distribution states. We accomplish this by giving the agent a constant reward of r=+1 for matching the demonstrated action in a demonstrated state, and a constant reward of r=0 for all other behavior. Our method, which we call soft Q imitation learning (SQIL), can be implemented with a handful of minor modifications to any standard Q-learning or off-policy actor-critic algorithm. Theoretically, we show that SQIL can be interpreted as a regularized variant of BC that uses a sparsity prior to encourage long-horizon imitation. Empirically, we show that SQIL outperforms BC and achieves competitive results compared to GAIL, on a variety of image-based and low-dimensional tasks in Box2D, Atari, and MuJoCo. This paper is a proof of concept that illustrates how a simple imitation method based on RL with constant rewards can be as effective as more complex methods that use learned rewards.
A simple and effective alternative to adversarial imitation learning: initialize experience replay buffer with demonstrations, set their reward to +1, set reward for all other data to 0, run Q-learning or soft actor-critic to train.

We introduce MultiGrain, a neural network architecture that generates compact image embedding vectors that solve multiple tasks of different granularity: class, instance, and copy recognition. MultiGrain is trained jointly for classification by optimizing the cross-entropy loss and for instance/copy recognition by optimizing a self-supervised ranking loss. The self-supervised loss only uses data augmentation and thus does not require additional labels. Remarkably, the unified embeddings are not only much more compact than using several specialized embeddings, but they also have the same or better accuracy. When fed to a linear classifier, MultiGrain using ResNet-50 achieves 79.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, a +1.8% absolute improvement over the the current state-of-the-art AutoAugment method. The same embeddings perform on par with state-of-the-art instance retrieval with images of moderate resolution. An ablation study shows that our approach benefits from the self-supervision, the pooling method and the mini-batches with repeated augmentations of the same image.

Combining classification and image retrieval in a neural network architecture, we obtain an improvement for both tasks.

Hypernetworks are meta neural networks that generate weights for a main neural network in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Despite extensive applications ranging from multi-task learning to Bayesian deep learning, the problem of optimizing hypernetworks has not been studied to date. We observe that classical weight initialization methods like Glorot & Bengio (2010) and He et al. (2015), when applied directly on a hypernet, fail to produce weights for the mainnet in the correct scale. We develop principled techniques for weight initialization in hypernets, and show that they lead to more stable mainnet weights, lower training loss, and faster convergence.

The first principled weight initialization method for hypernetworks