Title: Zero-Shot Visual Imitation,
Abstract: The current dominant paradigm for imitation learning relies on strong
supervision of expert actions to learn both 'what' and 'how' to imitate. We
pursue an alternative paradigm wherein an agent first explores the world
without any expert supervision and then distills its experience into a
goal-conditioned skill policy with a novel forward consistency loss. In our
framework, the role of the expert is only to communicate the goals (i.e., what
to imitate) during inference. The learned policy is then employed to mimic the
expert (i.e., how to imitate) after seeing just a sequence of images
demonstrating the desired task. Our method is 'zero-shot' in the sense that the
agent never has access to expert actions during training or for the task
demonstration at inference. We evaluate our zero-shot imitator in two
real-world settings: complex rope manipulation with a Baxter robot and
navigation in previously unseen office environments with a TurtleBot. Through
further experiments in VizDoom simulation, we provide evidence that better
mechanisms for exploration lead to learning a more capable policy which in turn
improves end task performance. Videos, models, and more details are available
at this https URL