  The performance of imitation learning is typically upper-bounded by the
performance of the demonstrator. While recent empirical results demonstrate
that ranked demonstrations allow for better-than-demonstrator performance,
preferences over demonstrations may be difficult to obtain, and little is known
theoretically about when such methods can be expected to successfully
extrapolate beyond the performance of the demonstrator. To address these
issues, we first contribute a sufficient condition for better-than-demonstrator
imitation learning and provide theoretical results showing why preferences over
demonstrations can better reduce reward function ambiguity when performing
inverse reinforcement learning. Building on this theory, we introduce
Disturbance-based Reward Extrapolation (D-REX), a ranking-based imitation
learning method that injects noise into a policy learned through behavioral
cloning to automatically generate ranked demonstrations. These ranked
demonstrations are used to efficiently learn a reward function that can then be
optimized using reinforcement learning. We empirically validate our approach on
simulated robot and Atari imitation learning benchmarks and show that D-REX
outperforms standard imitation learning approaches and can significantly
surpass the performance of the demonstrator. D-REX is the first imitation
learning approach to achieve significant extrapolation beyond the
demonstrator's performance without additional side-information or supervision,
such as rewards or human preferences. By generating rankings automatically, we
show that preference-based inverse reinforcement learning can be applied in
traditional imitation learning settings where only unlabeled demonstrations are
available.
