Learning to Imitate

A key aspect of human learning is imitation: the capability to mimic and learn behavior from a teacher or an expert. This is an important ability for acquiring new skills, such as walking, biking, or speaking a new language. Although current Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are capable of complex decision-making, such as mastering Go, playing complex strategic games like Starcraft, or manipulating a Rubik's cube, these systems often require over 100 million interactions with an environment to train -- equivalent of more than 100 years of human experience -- to reach human-level performance. In contrast, a human can acquire new skills in relatively short amounts of time by observing an expert. How can we enable our artificial agents to similarly acquire such fast learning ability?