title: Provable Representation Learning for Imitation Learning via Bi-level Optimization
abstract: A common strategy in modern learning systems is to learn a representation which is useful for many tasks, a.k.a, representation learning. We study this strategy in the imitation learning setting where multiple experts trajectories are available. We formulate representation learning as a bi-level optimization problem where the "outer" optimization tries to learn the joint representation and the "inner" optimization encodes the imitation learning setup and tries to learn task-specific parameters. We instantiate this framework for the cases where the imitation setting being behavior cloning and observation alone. Theoretically, we provably show using our framework that representation learning can reduce the sample complexity of imitation learning in both settings. We also provide proof-of-concept experiments to verify our theoretical findings.
authors: Sanjeev Arora Simon S. Du Sham Kakade Yuping Luo Nikunj Saunshi
hIndex: Sham Kakade 76