Learning Hierarchical Policies from Unsegmented Demonstrations using Causal Information

June 2018

Learning Hierarchical Policies from Unsegmented Demonstrations using Causal Information

Authors:

Mohit Sharma, Arjun Sharma, Nicholas Rhinehart, and Kris M. Kitani

Abstract:

The use of imitation learning to learn a single policy for a complex task that has multiple modes or hierarchical structure can be challenging. In fact, previous work has shown that when the modes are known, learning separate policies for each mode or sub-task can greatly improve the performance of imitation learning. In this work, we discover the interaction between sub-tasks from their resulting state-action trajectory sequences using a directed graphical model. We propose a new algorithm based on the generative adversarial imitation learning framework which automatically learns sub-task policies from unsegmented demonstrations. Our approach maximizes the directed information flow in the graphical model between sub-task latent variables and their generated trajectories. We also show how our approach connects with the existing Options framework, which is commonly used to learn hierarchical policies.
@workshop{Sharma-2018-109837,
author = {Mohit Sharma And Arjun Sharma And Nicholas Rhinehart And Kris M. Kitani},
title = {Learning Hierarchical Policies from Unsegmented Demonstrations using Causal Information},
booktitle = {Proceedings of RSS '18 Workshop on Perspectives in Robot Learning: Causality and Imitation},
year = {2018},
month = {June},
}
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