Behavioral Cloning from Observation
This work addresses a gap in imitation learning for autonomous agents by enabling faster learning from observation alone, which is incremental but could benefit robotics and AI systems.
The paper tackles the problem of imitation learning from observation only, without explicit action information, and proposes a two-phase autonomous technique called behavioral cloning from observation (BCO) that achieves comparable task performance to state-of-the-art methods like GAIL in simulation domains while showing increased learning speed.
Humans often learn how to perform tasks via imitation: they observe others perform a task, and then very quickly infer the appropriate actions to take based on their observations. While extending this paradigm to autonomous agents is a well-studied problem in general, there are two particular aspects that have largely been overlooked: (1) that the learning is done from observation only (i.e., without explicit action information), and (2) that the learning is typically done very quickly. In this work, we propose a two-phase, autonomous imitation learning technique called behavioral cloning from observation (BCO), that aims to provide improved performance with respect to both of these aspects. First, we allow the agent to acquire experience in a self-supervised fashion. This experience is used to develop a model which is then utilized to learn a particular task by observing an expert perform that task without the knowledge of the specific actions taken. We experimentally compare BCO to imitation learning methods, including the state-of-the-art, generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) technique, and we show comparable task performance in several different simulation domains while exhibiting increased learning speed after expert trajectories become available.