Adversarial Imitation

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) aims to train agents to mimic expert behavior without explicit reward functions, addressing the challenge of specifying rewards in complex real-world tasks. Current research focuses on improving sample efficiency and robustness by developing novel algorithms, such as those employing boosting, diffusion models, or contrastive learning, and by incorporating techniques from offline reinforcement learning and causal inference to mitigate issues like distributional shift and spurious correlations. These advancements are significant because they enable more efficient and reliable learning from limited expert demonstrations, paving the way for wider application in robotics, control systems, and other fields requiring complex skill acquisition.

Papers