Imitation with Neural Density Models

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 34 (NeurIPS 2021)

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Authors

Kuno Kim, Akshat Jindal, Yang Song, Jiaming Song, Yanan Sui, Stefano Ermon

Abstract

We propose a new framework for Imitation Learning (IL) via density estimation of the expert's occupancy measure followed by Maximum Occupancy Entropy Reinforcement Learning (RL) using the density as a reward. Our approach maximizes a non-adversarial model-free RL objective that provably lower bounds reverse Kullback–Leibler divergence between occupancy measures of the expert and imitator. We present a practical IL algorithm, Neural Density Imitation (NDI), which obtains state-of-the-art demonstration efficiency on benchmark control tasks.