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Imitation Bootstrapped Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 2311.02198 v6 pith:YGMFAJDT submitted 2023-11-03 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords demonstrationsibrlimitationlearningreinforcementtasksactionsbootstrapped
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Despite the considerable potential of reinforcement learning (RL), robotic control tasks predominantly rely on imitation learning (IL) due to its better sample efficiency. However, it is costly to collect comprehensive expert demonstrations that enable IL to generalize to all possible scenarios, and any distribution shift would require recollecting data for finetuning. Therefore, RL is appealing if it can build upon IL as an efficient autonomous self-improvement procedure. We propose imitation bootstrapped reinforcement learning (IBRL), a novel framework for sample-efficient RL with demonstrations that first trains an IL policy on the provided demonstrations and then uses it to propose alternative actions for both online exploration and bootstrapping target values. Compared to prior works that oversample the demonstrations or regularize RL with an additional imitation loss, IBRL is able to utilize high quality actions from IL policies since the beginning of training, which greatly accelerates exploration and training efficiency. We evaluate IBRL on 6 simulation and 3 real-world tasks spanning various difficulty levels. IBRL significantly outperforms prior methods and the improvement is particularly more prominent in harder tasks.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Do You Really Need to Pretrain Q-Functions for Online RL Fine-Tuning?

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    On six robot-manipulation tasks, offline Q-pretraining does not accelerate online RL fine-tuning from a pretrained policy, while seeding the replay buffer with rollouts from an ensemble of policies (IPE) improves fina...

  2. From Prior to Pro: Efficient Skill Mastery via Distribution Contractive RL Finetuning

    cs.RO 2026-03 accept novelty 6.0 of 10

    Residual off-policy RL with selective BC regularization and value-guided sampling contracts a pretrained generative robot policy around successful actions, reaching high success on hard long-horizon tasks from pixels ...

  3. SERNF: Sample-Efficient Real-World Dexterous Policy Fine-Tuning via Action-Chunked Critics and Normalizing Flows

    cs.RO 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    SERNF fine-tunes dexterous manipulation policies on real hardware by pairing normalizing-flow policies with action-chunked critics and conservative off-policy RL.

  4. Reinforcement Learning via Implicit Imitation Guidance

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A reinforcement learning method that learns a state-dependent covariance from expert-policy action differences and uses it as exploration noise, improving sample efficiency on sparse-reward continuous control tasks.

  5. Rapidly Adapting Policies to the Real World via Simulation-Guided Fine-Tuning

    cs.RO 2025-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    SGFT uses a simulation-trained value function to guide real-world exploration via potential-based reward shaping and short-horizon objectives, substantially improving fine-tuning sample efficiency.

  6. SimLauncher: Launching Sample-Efficient Real-world Robotic Reinforcement Learning via Simulation Pre-training

    cs.RO 2025-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Simulation-pretrained policies, with digital-twin demos for critic bootstrapping and action proposals, cut real-world RL training time while reaching near-perfect success on three manipulation tasks.

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