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Bootstrapping Apprenticeship Learning

2010

Conference Paper

ei


We consider the problem of apprenticeship learning where the examples, demonstrated by an expert, cover only a small part of a large state space. Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) provides an efficient tool for generalizing the demonstration, based on the assumption that the expert is maximizing a utility function that is a linear combination of state-action features. Most IRL algorithms use a simple Monte Carlo estimation to approximate the expected feature counts under the expert's policy. In this paper, we show that the quality of the learned policies is highly sensitive to the error in estimating the feature counts. To reduce this error, we introduce a novel approach for bootstrapping the demonstration by assuming that: (i), the expert is (near-)optimal, and (ii), the dynamics of the system is known. Empirical results on gridworlds and car racing problems show that our approach is able to learn good policies from a small number of demonstrations.

Author(s): Boularias, A. and Chaib-Draa, B.
Book Title: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23
Journal: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23: 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2010
Pages: 289-297
Year: 2010
Day: 0
Editors: Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta
Publisher: Curran

Department(s): Empirical Inference
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)

Event Name: Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2010)
Event Place: Vancouver, BC, Canada

Address: Red Hook, NY, USA
Digital: 0
ISBN: 978-1-617-82380-0
Language: en
Organization: Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
School: Biologische Kybernetik

Links: PDF
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BibTex

@inproceedings{6826,
  title = {Bootstrapping Apprenticeship Learning},
  author = {Boularias, A. and Chaib-Draa, B.},
  journal = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23: 24th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems 2010},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 23},
  pages = {289-297},
  editors = {Lafferty, J. , C. K.I. Williams, J. Shawe-Taylor, R. S. Zemel, A. Culotta},
  publisher = {Curran},
  organization = {Max-Planck-Gesellschaft},
  school = {Biologische Kybernetik},
  address = {Red Hook, NY, USA},
  year = {2010},
  doi = {}
}