# Improving Behavioural Cloning with Positive Unlabeled Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.11734 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11734/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 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 37 of its 55 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Jan 2023.

## Placed in

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

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [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)
- [Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09477/) (2018)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01643/) (2020)
- [Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04779/) (2020)
- [OpenAI Gym](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01540/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01345/) (2021)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06169/) (2021)
- [Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02900/) (2018)
- [DeepMind Control Suite](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.00690/) (2018)
- [A Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06860/) (2021)
- [Advantage-Weighted Regression: Simple and Scalable Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00177/) (2019)
- [Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01815/) (2017)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning as One Big Sequence Modeling Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02039/) (2021)
- [Implicit Behavioral Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00137/) (2021)
- [Uncertainty-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning with Diversified Q-Ensemble](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.01548/) (2021)
- [Critic Regularized Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15134/) (2020)
- [Improving Sample Efficiency in Model-Free Reinforcement Learning from Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01741/) (2019)
- [Positive-Unlabeled Learning with Non-Negative Risk Estimator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00593/) (2017)
- [Learning from positive and unlabeled data: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04820/) (2018)
- [Keep Doing What Worked: Behavioral Modelling Priors for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08396/) (2020)
- [Deep Dynamics Models for Learning Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11652/) (2019)
- [PLAS: Latent Action Space for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07213/) (2020)
- [Benchmarking Batch Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01708/) (2019)
- [Neural probabilistic motor primitives for humanoid control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11711/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [PALM: Progress-Aware Policy Learning via Affordance Reasoning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07060/) (2026)
- [Predicting Long-Term Human Behaviors in Discrete Representations via Physics-Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19528/) (2024)
- [Identifying Expert Behavior in Offline Training Datasets Improves Behavioral Cloning of Robotic Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13019/) (2023)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning with Domain-Unlabeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07465/) (2024)
- [Dataset Clustering for Improved Offline Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09550/) (2024)
- [SketchPlan: Diffusion Based Drone Planning From Human Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03545/) (2025)
- [How to Mitigate the Distribution Shift Problem in Robotics Control: A Robust and Adaptive Approach Based on Offline to Online Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25414/) (2026)
- [Learning from Mixed-Quality Deployment Experience for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29000/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Learning control policies offline from pre-recorded datasets is a promising avenue for solving challenging real-world problems. However, available datasets are typically of mixed quality, with a limited number of the trajectories that we would consider as positive examples; i.e., high-quality demonstrations. Therefore, we propose a novel iterative learning algorithm for identifying expert trajectories in unlabeled mixed-quality robotics datasets given a minimal set of positive examples, surpassing existing algorithms in terms of accuracy. We show that applying behavioral cloning to the resulting filtered dataset outperforms several competitive offline reinforcement learning and imitation learning baselines. We perform experiments on a range of simulated locomotion tasks and on two challenging manipulation tasks on a real robotic system; in these experiments, our method showcases state-of-the-art performance. Our website: urlhttps://sites.google.com/view/offline-policy-learning-pubc.