Imitating Latent Policies from Observation

We describe a novel approach to imitation learning that infers latent policies directly from state observations. We introduce a method that characterizes the causal effects of unknown actions on observations while simultaneously predicting their likelihood. We then outline an action alignment procedure that leverages a small amount of environment interactions to determine a mapping between latent and real-world actions. We show that this corrected labeling can be used for imitating the observed behavior, even though no expert actions are given. We evaluate our approach within classic control and photo-realistic visual environments and demonstrate that it performs well when compared to standard approaches.