Model Predictive Adversarial Imitation Learning for Planning from Observation

Abstract: Human demonstration data is often ambiguous and incomplete, motivating imitation learning approaches that also exhibit reliable planning behavior. A common paradigm to perform planning-from-demonstration involves learning a reward function via Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) then deploying this reward via Model Predictive Control (MPC). Towards unifying these methods, we derive a replacement of the policy in IRL with a planning-based agent. With connections to Adversarial Imitation Learning, this formulation enables end-to-end interactive learning of planners from observation-only demonstrations. In addition to benefits in interpretability, complexity, and safety, we study and observe significant improvements on sample efficiency, out-of-distribution generalization, and robustness. The study includes evaluations in both simulated control benchmarks and real-world navigation experiments using few-to-single observation-only demonstrations.