Disturbance-Injected Robust Imitation Learning with Task Achievement

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel imitation learning framework that effectively leverages diverse-quality demonstrations by combining policy robustification with selective learning from high and low achievement data, enhancing robustness and data efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a new method that integrates disturbance injection with a focus on high-quality demonstrations, improving robustness and reducing sample requirements in imitation learning.

Findings

High-achieving policies with increased stability and robustness.

Effective utilization of diverse-quality demonstrations without discarding sub-optimal data.

Improved data efficiency in imitation learning tasks.

Abstract

Robust imitation learning using disturbance injections overcomes issues of limited variation in demonstrations. However, these methods assume demonstrations are optimal, and that policy stabilization can be learned via simple augmentations. In real-world scenarios, demonstrations are often of diverse-quality, and disturbance injection instead learns sub-optimal policies that fail to replicate desired behavior. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel imitation learning framework that combines both policy robustification and optimal demonstration learning. Specifically, this combinatorial approach forces policy learning and disturbance injection optimization to focus on mainly learning from high task achievement demonstrations, while utilizing low achievement ones to decrease the number of samples needed. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified through experiments using an excavation task in both simulations and a real robot, resulting in high-achieving policies that are more stable and robust to diverse-quality demonstrations. In addition, this method utilizes all of the weighted sub-optimal demonstrations without eliminating them, resulting in practical data efficiency benefits.