  We develop a method for policy architecture search and adaptation via
gradient-free optimization which can learn to perform autonomous driving tasks.
By learning from both demonstration and environmental reward we develop a model
that can learn with relatively few early catastrophic failures. We first learn
an architecture of appropriate complexity to perceive aspects of world state
relevant to the expert demonstration, and then mitigate the effect of
domain-shift during deployment by adapting a policy demonstrated in a source
domain to rewards obtained in a target environment. We show that our approach
allows safer learning than baseline methods, offering a reduced cumulative
crash metric over the agent's lifetime as it learns to drive in a realistic
simulated environment.
