# Reinforced Imitation Learning by Free Energy Principle

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.11811 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11811/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Imitation learning methods, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- Builds on 19 of its 33 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 2021.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Imitation learning methods](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/imitation-learning-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.5602/) (2013)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10087/) (2017)
- [Reinforcement Learning and Control as Probabilistic Inference: Tutorial and Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.00909/) (2018)
- [Overcoming Exploration in Reinforcement Learning with Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10089/) (2017)
- [Leveraging Demonstrations for Deep Reinforcement Learning on Robotics Problems with Sparse Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.08817/) (2017)
- [Deep Imitative Models for Flexible Inference, Planning, and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06544/) (2018)
- [Deep Active Inference as Variational Policy Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.03876/) (2019)
- [Making Efficient Use of Demonstrations to Solve Hard Exploration Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01387/) (2019)
- [Deep Active Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.02341/) (2017)
- [Truncated Horizon Policy Search: Combining Reinforcement Learning & Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.11240/) (2018)
- [Reinforced Imitation: Sample Efficient Deep Reinforcement Learning for Map-less Navigation by Leveraging Prior Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07095/) (2018)
- [SQIL: Imitation Learning via Reinforcement Learning with Sparse Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11108/) (2019)
- [Dual Policy Iteration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10755/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires a large amount of exploration especially in sparse-reward settings. Imitation Learning (IL) can learn from expert demonstrations without exploration, but it never exceeds the expert's performance and is also vulnerable to distributional shift between demonstration and execution. In this paper, we radically unify RL and IL based on Free Energy Principle (FEP). FEP is a unified Bayesian theory of the brain that explains perception, action and model learning by a common fundamental principle. We present a theoretical extension of FEP and derive an algorithm in which an agent learns the world model that internalizes expert demonstrations and at the same time uses the model to infer the current and future states and actions that maximize rewards. The algorithm thus reduces exploration costs by partially imitating experts as well as maximizing its return in a seamless way, resulting in a higher performance than the suboptimal expert. Our experimental results show that this approach is promising in visual control tasks especially in sparse-reward environments.