<p>The authors of the paper <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.11248.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Learning Robust Rewards with Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning</a> (2018, published in ICRL), which introduced the inverse RL technique <strong>AIRL</strong>, argue that <strong>GAIL</strong> fails to generalize to different environment's dynamics. Specifically, in section 7.2 (p. 7), they describe an experiment where they disable and shrink the two front legs of the <a href="https://gym.openai.com/envs/Ant-v2/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">ant</a>, then, based on the results, they conclude</p>
<blockquote>
<p>GAIL learns successfully in the training domain, but does not acquire a representation that is suitable for transfer to test domains.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On the other hand, according to their experiments, AIRL is more robust to changes in the environment's dynamics.</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-05T23:40:15.013Z
2020-11-05T23:45:50.413Z
2020-11-05T23:45:50.413Z
nbro
<p>Is the <a href="https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2016/file/cc7e2b878868cbae992d1fb743995d8f-Paper.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">GAIL</a> applicable if the expert's trajectories (sample data) are for the same task but are in a different environment (modified but will not be completely different)?</p>
<p>My gut feeling is, yes, otherwise we can just simply adopt behavioural cloning. Furthermore, since the expert's trajectories are from a different environment, the dimension/length of state-action pairs will most likely be different. Will those trajectories still be useful for GAIL training?</p>

CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-05T23:23:14.823Z
What do you mean by "behavioural cloning" here?
nbro
CC BY-SA 4.0
2020-11-06T11:46:27.293Z
I mean the supervised imitation learning approach where the agent tries to copy the demonstrated labeled data.
Sam
<reinforcement-learning><generative-adversarial-networks><generative-model><imitation-learning><gail>
Is GAIL applicable if the expert's trajectories are for the same task but are in a different environment?
Sam
# Is GAIL applicable if the expert's trajectories are for the same task but are in a different environment?

(Asked by: username_0 on 2020-06-30)

Is the [GAIL](https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2016/file/cc7e2b878868cbae992d1fb743995d8f-Paper.pdf) applicable if the expert's trajectories (sample data) are for the same task but are in a different environment (modified but will not be completely different)?

My gut feeling is, yes, otherwise we can just simply adopt behavioural cloning. Furthermore, since the expert's trajectories are from a different environment, the dimension/length of state-action pairs will most likely be different. Will those trajectories still be useful for GAIL training?

**Tags:** reinforcement-learning, generative-adversarial-networks, generative-model, imitation-learning, gail

> **Comments:**
> **username_1**: What do you mean by "behavioural cloning" here?  
> **username_0**: I mean the supervised imitation learning approach where the agent tries to copy the demonstrated labeled data.  

---

## 1 answers

### Answer by username_1 on 2020-11-05. Score: 1 | Accepted answer

The authors of the paper [Learning Robust Rewards with Adversarial Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.11248.pdf) (2018, published in ICRL), which introduced the inverse RL technique **AIRL**, argue that **GAIL** fails to generalize to different environment's dynamics. Specifically, in section 7.2 (p. 7), they describe an experiment where they disable and shrink the two front legs of the [ant](https://gym.openai.com/envs/Ant-v2/), then, based on the results, they conclude

> GAIL learns successfully in the training domain, but does not acquire a representation that is suitable for transfer to test domains.

On the other hand, according to their experiments, AIRL is more robust to changes in the environment's dynamics.


---

