Model-based Adversarial Imitation Learning from Demonstrations and Human Reward

Reinforcement learning (RL) can potentially be applied to real-world robot control in complex and uncertain environments. However, it is difficult or even unpractical to design an efficient reward function for various tasks, especially those large and high-dimensional environments. Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) - a general model-free imitation learning method, allows robots to directly learn policies from expert trajectories in large and high-dimensional environments. However, GAIL is still sample inefficient in terms of environmental interaction. In this paper, to solve this problem, we propose a model-based adversarial imitation learning from demonstrations and human reward (MAILDH), a novel model-based interactive imitation framework combining the advantages of GAIL, interactive RL and model-based RL. We tested our method in eight physics-based discrete and continuous control tasks for RL. Our results show that MAILDH can greatly improve the sample efficiency and robustness compared to the original GAIL.