Easy-IIL: Reducing Human Operational Burden in Interactive Imitation Learning via Assistant Experts

TL;DR

Easy-IIL introduces a framework that minimizes human effort in interactive imitation learning by using a model-based assistant expert, requiring only a single demonstration and critical interventions, while maintaining high performance.

Contribution

It proposes leveraging off-the-shelf model-based imitation methods as assistant experts to drastically reduce human involvement in IIL, with minimal demonstration and intervention.

Findings

Significantly reduces human operational burden

Maintains performance comparable to mainstream IIL methods

User studies show reduced subjective workload

Abstract

Interactive Imitation Learning (IIL) typically relies on extensive human involvement for both offline demonstration and online interaction. Prior work primarily focuses on reducing human effort in passive monitoring rather than active operation. Interestingly, structured model-based imitation approaches achieve comparable performance with significantly fewer demonstrations than end-to-end imitation learning policies in the low-data regime. However, these methods are typically surpassed by end-to-end policies as the data increases. Leveraging this insight, we propose Easy-IIL, a framework that utilizes off-the-shelf model-based imitation methods as an assistant expert to replace active human operation for the majority of data collection. The human expert only provides a single demonstration to initialize the assistant expert and intervenes in critical states where the task is approaching failure. Furthermore, Easy-IIL can maintain IIL performance by preserving both offline and online data quality. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate that Easy-IIL significantly reduces human operational burden while maintaining performance comparable to mainstream IIL baselines. User studies further confirm that Easy-IIL reduces subjective workload on the human expert. Project page: https://sites.google.com/view/easy-iil