mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Adversarial Imitation Learning from Incomplete Demonstrations

arXiv 1905.12310 ↗First posted 29 May 2019cs.LG cs.AI stat.MLcited by 16

On the map: Offline RL and imitation learning from data → Imitation learning methods

Abstract (arXiv)

Imitation learning targets deriving a mapping from states to actions, a.k.a. policy, from expert demonstrations. Existing methods for imitation learning typically require any actions in the demonstrations to be fully available, which is hard to ensure in real applications. Though algorithms for learning with unobservable actions have been proposed, they focus solely on state information and overlook the fact that the action sequence could still be partially available and provide useful information for policy deriving. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm called Action-Guided Adversarial Imitation Learning (AGAIL) that learns a policy from demonstrations with incomplete action sequences, i.e., incomplete demonstrations. The core idea of AGAIL is to separate demonstrations into state and action trajectories, and train a policy with state trajectories while using actions as auxiliary information to guide the training whenever applicable. Built upon the Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning, AGAIL has three components: a generator, a discriminator, and a guide. The generator learns a policy with rewards provided by the discriminator, which tries to distinguish state distributions between demonstrations and samples generated by the policy. The guide provides additional rewards to the generator when demonstrated actions for specific states are available. We compare AGAIL to other methods on benchmark tasks and show that AGAIL consistently delivers comparable performance to the state-of-the-art methods even when the action sequence in demonstrations is only partially available.

Key facts. Cited by 16 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Imitation learning methods, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data. Builds on 13 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 May 2019.

Builds on

13 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 2

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2018Behavioral Cloning from Observation4 May
  2. 2018Reinforcement Learning from Imperfect Demonstrations14 Feb

Other references · 11

  1. 2015Trust Region Policy Optimizationcited by 2,580
  2. 2016OpenAI Gymcited by 1,736
  3. 2016Generative Adversarial Imitation Learningcited by 1,597
  4. 2016End to End Learning for Self-Driving Carscited by 1,009
  5. 2016InfoGAN: Interpretable Representation Learning by Information Maximizing Generative Adversarial Netscited by 860
  6. 2018Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Functioncited by 752
  7. 2016Guided Cost Learning: Deep Inverse Optimal Control via Policy Optimizationcited by 406
  8. 2017Third-Person Imitation Learningcited by 103
  9. 2017Learning human behaviors from motion capture by adversarial imitationcited by 77
  10. 2013On the Complexity of Solving Markov Decision Problemscited by 31
  11. 2016Learning Transferable Policies for Monocular Reactive MAV Controlcited by 18

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Citing papers per year: 2020: 3; 2021: 3; 2022: 5; 2023: 1; 2024: 3; 2025: 1.

16 papers.

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  1. 2021Latent Imagination Facilitates Zero-Shot Transfer in Autonomous Racingcited by 26
  2. 2022You Only Live Once: Single-Life Reinforcement Learningcited by 24
  3. 2021Causal Navigation by Continuous-time Neural Networkscited by 23
  4. 2022Goal-Aware Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning from Imperfect Demonstration for Robotic Cloth Manipulationcited by 7
  5. 2024In-Trajectory Inverse Reinforcement Learning: Learn Incrementally Before An Ongoing Trajectory Terminatescited by 7
  6. 2020Forward and inverse reinforcement learning sharing network weights and hyperparameterscited by 6
  7. 2020On the Guaranteed Almost Equivalence between Imitation Learning from Observation and Demonstrationcited by 6
  8. 2022Are All Vision Models Created Equal? A Study of the Open-Loop to Closed-Loop Causality Gapcited by 5
  9. 2022Semi-Supervised Imitation Learning of Team Policies from Suboptimal Demonstrationscited by 2
  10. 2022Robust Offline Reinforcement Learning with Gradient Penalty and Constraint Relaxationcited by 2
  11. 2024SENSOR: Imitate Third-Person Expert's Behaviors via Active Sensoringcited by 1
  12. 2024PAIL: Performance based Adversarial Imitation Learning Engine for Carbon Neutral Optimizationcited by 1
4 more
  1. 2025Mixture of Autoencoder Experts Guidance using Unlabeled and Incomplete Data for Exploration in Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  2. 2020Investigating the Effects of Robot Engagement Communication on Learning from Demonstrationcited by 0
  3. 2021Learning Time-Invariant Reward Functions through Model-Based Inverse Reinforcement Learningcited by 0
  4. 2023Divide and Repair: Using Options to Improve Performance of Imitation Learning Against Adversarial Demonstrationscited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2024Diffusion-Reward Adversarial Imitation Learning
  2. 2025SD2AIL: Adversarial Imitation Learning from Synthetic Demonstrations via Diffusion Models
  3. 2023Unlabeled Imperfect Demonstrations in Adversarial Imitation Learning
  4. 2018Injective State-Image Mapping facilitates Visual Adversarial Imitation Learning
  5. 2023Sample-efficient Adversarial Imitation Learning
  6. 2018Directed-Info GAIL: Learning Hierarchical Policies from Unsegmented Demonstrations using Directed Information
  7. 2022Latent Policies for Adversarial Imitation Learning
  8. 2022Auto-Encoding Adversarial Imitation Learning