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Imitation Learning

Learning from demonstrations — robots that replicate human behavior from teleoperation data.

What Is Imitation Learning?

Imitation learning (IL) is a paradigm where a robot learns to perform tasks by observing and replicating expert demonstrations. Instead of learning from reward signals (as in reinforcement learning), the robot learns from state-action pairs collected during human teleoperation or kinesthetic teaching.

Key Approaches

  • Behavior Cloning (BC) — Supervised learning from (observation, action) pairs. Simple but prone to distribution shift.
  • DAgger — Iterative data collection: run policy, get expert corrections, retrain. Reduces distribution shift.
  • Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) — Infer reward function from demonstrations, then optimize policy.

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