Making Strides in Symbolic Imitation Learning: Offline Demonstrations, Online Tuning

arXiv:2611.13182v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have been the dominant paradigm in continuous control tasks due to their efficacy in function approximation, while interpretable evolutionary methods have lagged largely behind for the opposite reason. In this work, we introduce Symbolic Imitation Learning, a framework for distilling an oracle policy through an offline dataset into a decision list with linear model motion primitives. We show that this, in conjunction, with online Augmented-Random Search (ARS) tuning of the constants and motion primitives approximates the performance of the oracle across 20 benchmark RL tasks and exceeds the oracle in 11 of those 20 tasks while simultaneously producing parsimonious, interpretable policies that domain experts can better understand.