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We consider offline imitation learning (IL), which aims to train an agent to imitate from the dataset of expert demonstrations without online interaction with the environment. Behavioral Cloning (BC) has been a simple yet effective approach to offline IL, but it is also well-known to be vulnerable to the covariate shift resulting from the mismatch between the state distributions induced by the learned policy and the expert policy. Moreover, as often occurs in practice, when expert datasets are collected from an arbitrary state distribution instead of a stationary one, these shifts become more pronounced, potentially leading to substantial failures in existing IL methods. Specifically, we focus on covariate shift resulting from arbitrary state data distributions, such as biased data collection or incomplete trajectories, rather than shifts induced by changes in dynamics or noisy expert actions. In this paper, to mitigate the effect of the covariate shifts in BC, we propose DrilDICE, which utilizes a distributionally robust BC objective by employing a stationary distribution correction ratio estimation (DICE) to derive a feasible solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method through an extensive set of experiments covering diverse covariate shift scenarios. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach in improving the robustness against the shifts, outperforming existing offline IL methods in such scenarios.

Imitation learning trains policies to map from input observations to the actions that an expert would choose. In this setting, distribution shift frequently exacerbates the effect of misattributing expert actions to nuisance correlates among the observed variables. We observe that a common instance of this causal confusion occurs in partially observed settings when expert actions are strongly correlated over time: the imitator learns to cheat by predicting the expert's previous action, rather than the next action. To combat this copycat problem, we propose an adversarial approach to learn a feature representation that removes excess information about the previous expert action nuisance correlate, while retaining the information necessary to predict the next action. In our experiments, our approach improves performance significantly across a variety of partially observed imitation learning tasks.

Because we can observe the agent's thoughts, we can (1) more easily diagnose

Furthermore, we are often interested in being able to reach a wide range of configurations, hence setting up a different reward every time might be unpractical. Methods like Hindsight Experience Replay (HER) have recently shown promise to learn policies able to reach many goals, without the need of a reward.

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) largely benefit from the inclusion of Deep Neural Networks, boosting the number of novel approaches proposed in the field of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). These techniques demonstrate the ability to tackle complex games such as Atari, Go, and other real-world applications, including financial trading. Nevertheless, a significant challenge emerges from the lack of interpretability, particularly when attempting to comprehend the underlying patterns learned, the relative importance of the state features, and how they are integrated to generate the policy's output. For this reason, in mission-critical and real-world settings, it is often preferred to deploy a simpler and more interpretable algorithm, although at the cost of performance. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, supported by theoretical guarantees, that can extract an interpretable policy (e.g., a linear policy) without disregarding the peculiarities of expert behavior. This result is obtained by considering the advantage function, which includes information about why an action is superior to the others. In contrast to previous works, our approach enables the training of an interpretable policy using previously collected experience. The proposed algorithm is empirically evaluated on classic control environments and on a financial trading scenario, demonstrating its ability to extract meaningful information from complex expert policies.

We consider offline imitation learning (IL), which aims to train an agent to imitate from the dataset of expert demonstrations without online interaction with the environment. Behavioral Cloning (BC) has been a simple yet effective approach to offline IL, but it is also well-known to be vulnerable to the covariate shift resulting from the mismatch between the state distributions induced by the learned policy and the expert policy. Moreover, as often occurs in practice, when expert datasets are collected from an arbitrary state distribution instead of a stationary one, these shifts become more pronounced, potentially leading to substantial failures in existing IL methods. Specifically, we focus on covariate shift resulting from arbitrary state data distributions, such as biased data collection or incomplete trajectories, rather than shifts induced by changes in dynamics or noisy expert actions. In this paper, to mitigate the effect of the covariate shifts in BC, we propose DrilDICE, which utilizes a distributionally robust BC objective by employing a stationary distribution correction ratio estimation (DICE) to derive a feasible solution. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method through an extensive set of experiments covering diverse covariate shift scenarios.

Despite being trained on increasingly large datasets, robot models often overfit to specific environments or datasets. Consequently, they excel within their training distribution but face challenges in generalizing to novel or unforeseen scenarios. This paper presents a method to proactively identify failure mode probabilities in robot manipulation policies, providing insights into where these models are likely to falter. To this end, since exhaustively searching over a large space of failures is infeasible, we propose a deep reinforcement learning-based framework, RoboFail. It is designed to detect scenarios prone to failure and quantify their likelihood, thus offering a structured approach to anticipate failures. By identifying these high-risk states in advance, RoboFail enables researchers and engineers to better understand the robustness limits of robot policies, contributing to the development of safer and more adaptable robotic systems.

Imitation learning trains policies to map from input observations to the actions that an expert would choose. In this setting, distribution shift frequently exacerbates the effect of misattributing expert actions to nuisance correlates among the observed variables. We observe that a common instance of this causal confusion occurs in partially observed settings when expert actions are strongly correlated over time: the imitator learns to cheat by predicting the expert's previous action, rather than the next action. To combat this "copycat problem", we propose an adversarial approach to learn a feature representation that removes excess information about the previous expert action nuisance correlate, while retaining the information necessary to predict the next action. In our experiments, our approach improves performance significantly across a variety of partially observed imitation learning tasks.