Learning Neural Parsers with Deterministic Differentiable Imitation Learning

What is this all about?

This repository is code connected to the paper - T. Shankar, N. Rhinehart, K. Muelling, K. M. Kitani, Learning Neural Parsers with Deterministic Differentiable Imitation Learning, submitted to the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2018.

Where can I read this cool paper?

Click here to view the paper on ArXiv!

I want a TL;DR of what this repository does.

Our paper targets learning a parser to construct hierarchical decompositions of object images, by imitating a decision tree like algorithm. This repository implements the code for the following:

1. Introduces a framework to learn to decompose spatial tasks into segments by parsing, motivated by the problem of a painting robot covering a large object.
2. Formulates object decomposition as a parsing problem, inspired by the similarity between parse-trees of objects and structured decisions trees constructed by ID3.
3. Trains a neural object parser to construct hierarchical object decompositions by imitating a ground-truth expert, in the form of a information gain maximizing ID3 like algorithm.
4. Introduces a novel hybrid imitation-reinforcement learning approach, by building a deterministic DDPG-style actor-critic variant of AggreVaTeD.

Is that all?

Yes and no. I'm evaluating our novel policy gradient update, DRAG, on OpenAI Gym environments! you can check out https://github.com/tanmayshankar/GymRobotics for more!

Can I use this code to pretend I did some research?

Feel free to use my code, but please remember to cite my paper above (and this repository)!

I have a brilliant idea to make this even cooler!

Awesome! Feel free to mail me at tanmay.shankar@gmail.com with your suggestions, feedback and ideas!