Watch, Try, Learn: Meta-Learning from Demonstrations and Rewards

Allan Zhou, Eric Jang, Daniel Kappler, Alex Herzog, Mohi Khansari, Paul Wohlhart, Yunfei Bai, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Sergey Levine, Chelsea Finn

Keywords: imitation learning, meta learning, reinforcement learning

Wed Session 4 (17:00-19:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]
Wed Session 5 (20:00-22:00 GMT) [Live QA] [Cal]

Abstract: Imitation learning allows agents to learn complex behaviors from demonstrations. However, learning a complex vision-based task may require an impractical number of demonstrations. Meta-imitation learning is a promising approach towards enabling agents to learn a new task from one or a few demonstrations by leveraging experience from learning similar tasks. In the presence of task ambiguity or unobserved dynamics, demonstrations alone may not provide enough information; an agent must also try the task to successfully infer a policy. In this work, we propose a method that can learn to learn from both demonstrations and trial-and-error experience with sparse reward feedback. In comparison to meta-imitation, this approach enables the agent to effectively and efficiently improve itself autonomously beyond the demonstration data. In comparison to meta-reinforcement learning, we can scale to substantially broader distributions of tasks, as the demonstration reduces the burden of exploration. Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms prior approaches on a set of challenging, vision-based control tasks.

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