Diffusion Imitation from Observation

Abstract: Learning from observation (LfO) aims to imitate experts by learning from state-only demonstrations without requiring action labels. Existing adversarial imitation learning approaches learn a generator agent policy to produce state transitions that are indistinguishable to a discriminator that learns to classify agent and expert state transitions. Despite its simplicity in formulation, these methods are often sensitive to hyperparameters and brittle to train. Motivated by the recent success of diffusion models in generative modeling, we propose to integrate a diffusion model into the adversarial imitation learning from observation framework. Specifically, we employ a diffusion model to capture expert and agent transitions by generating the next state, given the current state. Then, we reformulate the learning objective to train the diffusion model as a binary classifier and use it to provide "realness" rewards for policy learning. Our proposed framework, Diffusion Imitation from Observation (DIFO), demonstrates superior performance in various continuous control domains, including navigation, locomotion, manipulation, and games. Project page: https://nturobotlearninglab.github.io/DIFO