Noise-conditioned Energy-based Annealed Rewards (NEAR): A Generative Framework for Imitation Learning from Observation

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Main Authors: Diwan, Anish Abhijit, Urain, Julen, Kober, Jens, Peters, Jan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Diwan, Anish Abhijit
Urain, Julen
Kober, Jens
Peters, Jan
author_facet Diwan, Anish Abhijit
Urain, Julen
Kober, Jens
Peters, Jan
contents This paper introduces a new imitation learning framework based on energy-based generative models capable of learning complex, physics-dependent, robot motion policies through state-only expert motion trajectories. Our algorithm, called Noise-conditioned Energy-based Annealed Rewards (NEAR), constructs several perturbed versions of the expert's motion data distribution and learns smooth, and well-defined representations of the data distribution's energy function using denoising score matching. We propose to use these learnt energy functions as reward functions to learn imitation policies via reinforcement learning. We also present a strategy to gradually switch between the learnt energy functions, ensuring that the learnt rewards are always well-defined in the manifold of policy-generated samples. We evaluate our algorithm on complex humanoid tasks such as locomotion and martial arts and compare it with state-only adversarial imitation learning algorithms like Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP). Our framework sidesteps the optimisation challenges of adversarial imitation learning techniques and produces results comparable to AMP in several quantitative metrics across multiple imitation settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_14856
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Noise-conditioned Energy-based Annealed Rewards (NEAR): A Generative Framework for Imitation Learning from Observation
Diwan, Anish Abhijit
Urain, Julen
Kober, Jens
Peters, Jan
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
This paper introduces a new imitation learning framework based on energy-based generative models capable of learning complex, physics-dependent, robot motion policies through state-only expert motion trajectories. Our algorithm, called Noise-conditioned Energy-based Annealed Rewards (NEAR), constructs several perturbed versions of the expert's motion data distribution and learns smooth, and well-defined representations of the data distribution's energy function using denoising score matching. We propose to use these learnt energy functions as reward functions to learn imitation policies via reinforcement learning. We also present a strategy to gradually switch between the learnt energy functions, ensuring that the learnt rewards are always well-defined in the manifold of policy-generated samples. We evaluate our algorithm on complex humanoid tasks such as locomotion and martial arts and compare it with state-only adversarial imitation learning algorithms like Adversarial Motion Priors (AMP). Our framework sidesteps the optimisation challenges of adversarial imitation learning techniques and produces results comparable to AMP in several quantitative metrics across multiple imitation settings.
title Noise-conditioned Energy-based Annealed Rewards (NEAR): A Generative Framework for Imitation Learning from Observation
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14856