The Past and Present of Imitation Learning: A Citation Chain Study

I NTRODUCTION Imitation Learning is a promising area of active research. Early research in'programming by example' began in Software Development [9] before attracting the interest of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers, who began using the terms'Learning from Demonstration' and'Imitation Learning' to describe their line of work. Over the last 30 years, Imitation Learning has advanced significantly and been used to solve difficult tasks ranging from Autonomous Driving [12] to playing Atari games [5]. In the course of this development, different methods for performing Imitation Learning have fallen into and out of favor. In this paper, I will explore the development of these different methods and attempt to examine how the field has progressed. I will be discussing 4 landmark papers that sequentially cite and inform each other.