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An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learning

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arxiv 1811.06711 v1 pith:Q4AAM5XC submitted 2018-11-16 cs.RO cs.LG

classification cs.ROcs.LG
keywords learningimitationalgorithmsbehaviorexpertsframeworksmanuallytools
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a teacher to demonstrate a desired behavior rather than attempt to manually engineer it. This process of learning from demonstrations, and the study of algorithms to do so, is called imitation learning. This work provides an introduction to imitation learning. It covers the underlying assumptions, approaches, and how they relate; the rich set of algorithms developed to tackle the problem; and advice on effective tools and implementation. We intend this paper to serve two audiences. First, we want to familiarize machine learning experts with the challenges of imitation learning, particularly those arising in robotics, and the interesting theoretical and practical distinctions between it and more familiar frameworks like statistical supervised learning theory and reinforcement learning. Second, we want to give roboticists and experts in applied artificial intelligence a broader appreciation for the frameworks and tools available for imitation learning.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. REGEN: Replay-recycling for Expert-to-Generalist distillation with Offline Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Using only the replay buffers from RL training of domain-expert LLMs, REGEN trains a multi-domain generalist via offline RL and matches online multi-teacher distillation accuracy at a fraction of the reported training cost.

  2. Robot-Gated Interactive Imitation Learning with Adaptive Intervention Mechanism

    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A learned proxy Q-function that triggers expert help when agent and expert actions diverge reduces human takeover cost and improves imitation learning efficiency in simulated driving and navigation.

  3. Confidence-Guided Human-AI Collaboration: Reinforcement Learning with Distributional Proxy Value Propagation for Autonomous Driving

    cs.RO 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    C-HAC combines human demonstrations and reward-based RL for driving, using distributional return estimates to decide when the agent should follow the human-guided policy versus its self-learned policy.

  4. Imitation Learning via Focused Satisficing

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    MinSubFI directly minimizes subdominance, a margin-based measure of failing to be acceptable, and empirically reports higher demonstrator acceptability than prior imitation methods.

  5. Imitation Learning-Based Path Generation for the Complex Assembly of Deformable Objects

    cs.RO 2025-05 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A behavior-cloning policy trained on 100 virtual and 10 human-corrected paths generates a reference trajectory for a rubber belt insertion task.

  6. Principles of Robot Autonomy

    cs.RO 2026-08 unverdicted novelty 1.0 of 10

    A comprehensive textbook framing autonomous robots through a See-Think-Act pipeline, with exercises and notebooks, but no new technical findings.

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