Deconfounding Imitation Learning with Variational Inference

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Vuorio, Risto, de Haan, Pim, Brehmer, Johann, Ackermann, Hanno, Dijkman, Daniel, Cohen, Taco
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2022
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author Vuorio, Risto
de Haan, Pim
Brehmer, Johann
Ackermann, Hanno
Dijkman, Daniel
Cohen, Taco
author_facet Vuorio, Risto
de Haan, Pim
Brehmer, Johann
Ackermann, Hanno
Dijkman, Daniel
Cohen, Taco
contents Standard imitation learning can fail when the expert demonstrators have different sensory inputs than the imitating agent. This is because partial observability gives rise to hidden confounders in the causal graph. In previous work, to work around the confounding problem, policies have been trained using query access to the expert's policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). However, both approaches have drawbacks as the expert's policy may not be available and IRL can be unstable in practice. Instead, we propose to train a variational inference model to infer the expert's latent information and use it to train a latent-conditional policy. We prove that using this method, under strong assumptions, the identification of the correct imitation learning policy is theoretically possible from expert demonstrations alone. In practice, we focus on a setting with less strong assumptions where we use exploration data for learning the inference model. We show in theory and practice that this algorithm converges to the correct interventional policy, solves the confounding issue, and can under certain assumptions achieve an asymptotically optimal imitation performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2211_02667
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deconfounding Imitation Learning with Variational Inference
Vuorio, Risto
de Haan, Pim
Brehmer, Johann
Ackermann, Hanno
Dijkman, Daniel
Cohen, Taco
Machine Learning
Standard imitation learning can fail when the expert demonstrators have different sensory inputs than the imitating agent. This is because partial observability gives rise to hidden confounders in the causal graph. In previous work, to work around the confounding problem, policies have been trained using query access to the expert's policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). However, both approaches have drawbacks as the expert's policy may not be available and IRL can be unstable in practice. Instead, we propose to train a variational inference model to infer the expert's latent information and use it to train a latent-conditional policy. We prove that using this method, under strong assumptions, the identification of the correct imitation learning policy is theoretically possible from expert demonstrations alone. In practice, we focus on a setting with less strong assumptions where we use exploration data for learning the inference model. We show in theory and practice that this algorithm converges to the correct interventional policy, solves the confounding issue, and can under certain assumptions achieve an asymptotically optimal imitation performance.
title Deconfounding Imitation Learning with Variational Inference
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02667