{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/learning-sparse-rewarded-tasks-from-sub","title":"Learning Sparse Rewarded Tasks from Sub-Optimal Demonstrations","arxiv_id":"2004.00530","date":"2020-04-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhuangdi Zhu","Kaixiang Lin","Bo Dai","Jiayu Zhou"],"abstract":"Model-free deep reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated its superiority on many complex sequential decision-making problems. However, heavy dependence on dense rewards and high sample-complexity impedes the wide adoption of these methods in real-world scenarios. On the other hand, imitation learning (IL) learns effectively in sparse-rewarded tasks by leveraging the existing expert demonstrations. In practice, collecting a sufficient amount of expert demonstrations can be prohibitively expensive, and the quality of demonstrations typically limits the performance of the learning policy. In this work, we propose Self-Adaptive Imitation Learning (SAIL) that can achieve (near) optimal performance given only a limited number of sub-optimal demonstrations for highly challenging sparse reward tasks. SAIL bridges the advantages of IL and RL to reduce the sample complexity substantially, by effectively exploiting sup-optimal demonstrations and efficiently exploring the environment to surpass the demonstrated performance. Extensive empirical results show that not only does SAIL significantly improve the sample-efficiency but also leads to much better final performance across different continuous control tasks, comparing to the state-of-the-art.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.00530v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.00530v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"learning-sparse-rewarded-tasks-from-sub","repo_url":"https://github.com/illidanlab/sail","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"Continuous Control"},{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"deep-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Deep Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"sequential-decision-making","task_name":"Sequential Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"continuous-control","task_name":"continuous-control"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2004.00530","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2004.00530"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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