Learning from Guided Play: Improving Exploration for Adversarial Imitation Learning with Simple Auxiliary Tasks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) has become a popular alternative to supervised imitation learning that reduces the distribution shift suffered by the latter. However, AIL requires effective exploration during an online reinforcement learning phase. In this work, we show that the standard, naive approach to exploration can manifest as a suboptimal local maximum if a policy learned with AIL sufficiently matches the expert distribution without fully learning the desired task. This can be particularly catastrophic for manipulation tasks, where the difference between an expert and a non-expert state-action pair is often subtle. We present Learning from Guided Play (LfGP), a framework in which we leverage expert demonstrations of multiple exploratory, auxiliary tasks in addition to a main task. The addition of these auxiliary tasks forces the agent to explore states and actions that standard AIL may learn to ignore. Additionally, this particular formulation allows for the reusability of expert data between main tasks. Our experimental results in a challenging multitask robotic manipulation domain indicate that LfGP significantly outperforms both AIL and behaviour cloning, while also being more expert sample efficient than these baselines. To explain this performance gap, we provide further analysis of a toy problem that highlights the coupling between a local maximum and poor exploration, and also visualize the differences between the learned models from AIL and LfGP.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".