{"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/object-aware-regularization-for-addressing","title":"Object-Aware Regularization for Addressing Causal Confusion in Imitation Learning","arxiv_id":"2110.14118","date":"2021-10-27","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Jongjin Park","Younggyo Seo","Chang Liu","Li Zhao","Tao Qin","Jinwoo Shin","Tie-Yan Liu"],"abstract":"Behavioral cloning has proven to be effective for learning sequential decision-making policies from expert demonstrations. However, behavioral cloning often suffers from the causal confusion problem where a policy relies on the noticeable effect of expert actions due to the strong correlation but not the cause we desire. This paper presents Object-aware REgularizatiOn (OREO), a simple technique that regularizes an imitation policy in an object-aware manner. Our main idea is to encourage a policy to uniformly attend to all semantic objects, in order to prevent the policy from exploiting nuisance variables strongly correlated with expert actions. To this end, we introduce a two-stage approach: (a) we extract semantic objects from images by utilizing discrete codes from a vector-quantized variational autoencoder, and (b) we randomly drop the units that share the same discrete code together, i.e., masking out semantic objects. Our experiments demonstrate that OREO significantly improves the performance of behavioral cloning, outperforming various other regularization and causality-based methods on a variety of Atari environments and a self-driving CARLA environment. We also show that our method even outperforms inverse reinforcement learning methods trained with a considerable amount of environment interaction.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14118v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.14118v1.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":"object-aware-regularization-for-addressing","repo_url":"https://github.com/alinlab/oreo","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"decision-making","task_name":"Decision Making"},{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"},{"task_slug":"sequential-decision-making","task_name":"Sequential Decision Making"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"carla","method_name":"CARLA"},{"method_slug":"entropy-regularization","method_name":"Entropy Regularization"},{"method_slug":"ppo","method_name":"PPO"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.14118","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2110.14118"}},"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. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/alinlab/oreo","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1,"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":2,"ran":2,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"df1d8f7a661458e6","entry":"Projector","repo":"alinlab/oreo","repo_kind":"official","path":"linear_models.py","file_url":"https://github.com/alinlab/oreo/blob/HEAD/linear_models.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"df1d8f7a661458e6"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"234d80e79472bd96","entry":"compute_loss","repo":"alinlab/oreo","repo_kind":"official","path":"atari_beta_vae.py","file_url":"https://github.com/alinlab/oreo/blob/HEAD/atari_beta_vae.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"NONE","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"234d80e79472bd96"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}