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Related papers: Imitation Learning as Return Distribution Matching

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Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Zhuangdi Zhu , Kaixiang Lin , Bo Dai , Jiayu Zhou

In inverse reinforcement learning (IRL), an agent seeks to replicate expert demonstrations through interactions with the environment. Traditionally, IRL is treated as an adversarial game, where an adversary searches over reward models, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Arnav Kumar Jain , Harley Wiltzer , Jesse Farebrother , Irina Rish , Glen Berseth , Sanjiban Choudhury

We propose a distributional framework for offline Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) that jointly models uncertainty over reward functions and full distributions of returns. Unlike conventional IRL approaches that recover a deterministic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Feiyang Wu , Ye Zhao , Anqi Wu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a framework to optimize a control policy using rewards that are revealed by the system as a response to a control action. In its standard form, RL involves a single agent that uses its policy to accomplish a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-24 Juan Cervino , Juan Andres Bazerque , Miguel Calvo-Fullana , Alejandro Ribeiro

Imitation learning (IL) from a state-based reinforcement learning (RL) policy is a common approach to overcome the curse of dimensionality in complex and high-dimensional observation spaces prevalent in robotics. This paper addresses the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Meraj Mammadov , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires , Johannes Andreas Stork

Imitation Learning (IL) is a widely used framework for learning imitative behavior from demonstrations. It is especially appealing for solving complex real-world tasks where handcrafting reward function is difficult, or when the goal is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Chenran Li , Chen Tang , Haruki Nishimura , Jean Mercat , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Wei Zhan

Self-healing capability is one of the most critical factors for a resilient distribution system, which requires intelligent agents to automatically perform restorative actions online, including network reconfiguration and reactive power…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-05-11 Yichen Zhang , Feng Qiu , Tianqi Hong , Zhaoyu Wang , Fangxing Li

Imitation learning (IL) is a simple and powerful way to use high-quality human driving data, which can be collected at scale, to produce human-like behavior. However, policies based on imitation learning alone often fail to sufficiently…

When cast into the Deep Reinforcement Learning framework, many robotics tasks require solving a long horizon and sparse reward problem, where learning algorithms struggle. In such context, Imitation Learning (IL) can be a powerful approach…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-14 Alexandre Chenu , Nicolas Perrin-Gilbert , Olivier Sigaud

In many sequential decision-making problems (e.g., robotics control, game playing, sequential prediction), human or expert data is available containing useful information about the task. However, imitation learning (IL) from a small amount…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-04 Divyansh Garg , Shuvam Chakraborty , Chris Cundy , Jiaming Song , Matthieu Geist , Stefano Ermon

In many real-world settings, an agent must learn to act in environments where no reward signal can be specified, but a set of expert demonstrations is available. Imitation learning (IL) is a popular framework for learning policies from such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Risto Vuorio , Mattie Fellows , Cong Lu , Clémence Grislain , Shimon Whiteson

In this paper, we study the problem of obtaining a control policy that can mimic and then outperform expert demonstrations in Markov decision processes where the reward function is unknown to the learning agent. One main relevant approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Feng Tao , Yongcan Cao

We consider the problem of imitation learning from a finite set of expert trajectories, without access to reinforcement signals. The classical approach of extracting the expert's reward function via inverse reinforcement learning, followed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-10 Ruohan Wang , Carlo Ciliberto , Pierluigi Amadori , Yiannis Demiris

Learning-based approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL) and imitation learning (IL), have indicated superiority over rule-based approaches in complex urban autonomous driving environments, showing great potential to make intelligent…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-31 Haochen Liu , Zhiyu Huang , Jingda Wu , Chen Lv

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) infers a reward function from demonstrations, allowing for policy improvement and generalization. However, despite much recent interest in IRL, little work has been done to understand the minimum set of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-19 Daniel S. Brown , Scott Niekum

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-04-14 Michael Herman , Tobias Gindele , Jörg Wagner , Felix Schmitt , Wolfram Burgard

The inverse reinforcement learning approach to imitation learning is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can enable learning from a smaller number of expert demonstrations with more robustness to error compounding than behavioral…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-06 Juntao Ren , Gokul Swamy , Zhiwei Steven Wu , J. Andrew Bagnell , Sanjiban Choudhury

We consider the Imitation Learning (IL) setup where expert data are not collected on the actual deployment environment but on a different version. To address the resulting distribution shift, we combine behavior cloning (BC) with a planner…

Many imitation learning (IL) algorithms use inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to infer a reward function that aligns with the demonstration. However, the inferred reward functions often fail to capture the underlying task objectives. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of inferring a reward function from expert behavior. There are several approaches to IRL, but most are designed to learn a Markovian reward. However, a reward function might be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Noah Topper , Alvaro Velasquez , George Atia