Direct Policy Iteration with Demonstrations / 3380
Jessica Chemali, Alessandro Lazaric
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We consider the problem of learning the optimal policy of an unknown Markov decision process (MDP) when expert demonstrations are available along with interaction samples. We build on classification-based policy iteration to perform a seamless integration of interaction and expert data, thus obtaining an algorithm which can benefit from both sources of information at the same time. Furthermore, we provide a full theoretical analysis of the performance across iterations providing insights on how the algorithm works. Finally, we report an empirical evaluation of the algorithm and a comparison with the state-of-the-art algorithms.