Papers › Agnostic Interactive Imitation Learning: New Theory and Practical Algorithms

Agnostic Interactive Imitation Learning: New Theory and Practical Algorithms

28 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.16860archive 2025-07-28

Yichen Li, Chicheng Zhang

We study interactive imitation learning, where a learner interactively queries a demonstrating expert for action annotations, aiming to learn a policy that has performance competitive with the expert, using as few annotations as possible. We focus on the general agnostic setting where the expert demonstration policy may not be contained in the policy class used by the learner. We propose a new oracle-efficient algorithm MFTPL-P (abbreviation for Mixed Follow the Perturbed Leader with Poisson perturbations) with provable finite-sample guarantees, under the assumption that the learner is given access to samples from some ``explorative'' distribution over states. Our guarantees hold for any policy class, which is considerably broader than prior state of the art. We further propose Bootstrap-Dagger, a more practical variant that does not require additional sample access. Empirically, MFTPL-P and Bootstrap-Dagger notably surpass online and offline imitation learning baselines in continuous control tasks.

PaperPDFCode

Code

liyichen1998/bootstrapdagger-mftplp officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Continuous ControlImitation Learningcontinuous-control

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Focus

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections