Offline Imitation Learning upon Arbitrary Demonstrations by Pre-Training Dynamics Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Ma, Haitong, Dai, Bo, Ren, Zhaolin, Wang, Yebin, Li, Na
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Ma, Haitong
Dai, Bo
Ren, Zhaolin
Wang, Yebin
Li, Na
author_facet Ma, Haitong
Dai, Bo
Ren, Zhaolin
Wang, Yebin
Li, Na
contents Limited data has become a major bottleneck in scaling up offline imitation learning (IL). In this paper, we propose enhancing IL performance under limited expert data by introducing a pre-training stage that learns dynamics representations, derived from factorizations of the transition dynamics. We first theoretically justify that the optimal decision variable of offline IL lies in the representation space, significantly reducing the parameters to learn in the downstream IL. Moreover, the dynamics representations can be learned from arbitrary data collected with the same dynamics, allowing the reuse of massive non-expert data and mitigating the limited data issues. We present a tractable loss function inspired by noise contrastive estimation to learn the dynamics representations at the pre-training stage. Experiments on MuJoCo demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can mimic expert policies with as few as a single trajectory. Experiments on real quadrupeds show that we can leverage pre-trained dynamics representations from simulator data to learn to walk from a few real-world demonstrations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_14383
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Offline Imitation Learning upon Arbitrary Demonstrations by Pre-Training Dynamics Representations
Ma, Haitong
Dai, Bo
Ren, Zhaolin
Wang, Yebin
Li, Na
Robotics
Machine Learning
Limited data has become a major bottleneck in scaling up offline imitation learning (IL). In this paper, we propose enhancing IL performance under limited expert data by introducing a pre-training stage that learns dynamics representations, derived from factorizations of the transition dynamics. We first theoretically justify that the optimal decision variable of offline IL lies in the representation space, significantly reducing the parameters to learn in the downstream IL. Moreover, the dynamics representations can be learned from arbitrary data collected with the same dynamics, allowing the reuse of massive non-expert data and mitigating the limited data issues. We present a tractable loss function inspired by noise contrastive estimation to learn the dynamics representations at the pre-training stage. Experiments on MuJoCo demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can mimic expert policies with as few as a single trajectory. Experiments on real quadrupeds show that we can leverage pre-trained dynamics representations from simulator data to learn to walk from a few real-world demonstrations.
title Offline Imitation Learning upon Arbitrary Demonstrations by Pre-Training Dynamics Representations
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14383