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arXiv · 2403.01059

Continuous Mean-Zero Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning (CMZ-DRIL)

Noah Ford·Ryan W. Gardner·Austin Juhl·Nathan Larson
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Abstract

Machine-learning paradigms such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning can generate highly performant agents in a variety of complex environments. However, commonly used methods require large quantities of data and/or a known reward function. This paper presents a method called Continuous Mean-Zero Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning (CMZ-DRIL) that employs a novel reward structure to improve the performance of imitation-learning agents that have access to only a handful of expert demonstrations. CMZ-DRIL uses reinforcement learning to minimize uncertainty among an ensemble of agents trained to model the expert demonstrations. This method does not use any environment-specific rewards, but creates a continuous and mean-zero reward function from the action disagreement of the agent ensemble. As demonstrated in a waypoint-navigation environment and in two MuJoCo environments, CMZ-DRIL can generate performant agents that behave more similarly to the expert than primary previous approaches in several key metrics.

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Noah Ford, Ryan W. Gardner, Austin Juhl, Nathan Larson. 2024-03-02. Continuous Mean-Zero Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning (CMZ-DRIL). https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.01059

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