Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Youngsoo Jang, Geon-Hyeong Kim, Jongmin Lee, Sungryull Sohn, Byoungjip Kim, Honglak Lee, Moontae Lee
We consider offline safe imitation learning (IL), where the agent aims to learn the safe policy that mimics preferred behavior while avoiding non-preferred behavior from non-preferred demonstrations and unlabeled demonstrations. This problem setting corresponds to various real-world scenarios, where satisfying safety constraints is more important than maximizing the expected return. However, it is very challenging to learn the policy to avoid constraint-violating (i.e. non-preferred) behavior, as opposed to standard imitation learning which learns the policy to mimic given demonstrations. In this paper, we present a hyperparameter-free offline safe IL algorithm, SafeDICE, that learns safe policy by leveraging the non-preferred demonstrations in the space of stationary distributions. Our algorithm directly estimates the stationary distribution corrections of the policy that imitate the demonstrations excluding the non-preferred behavior. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our algorithm learns a more safe policy that satisfies the cost constraint without degrading the reward performance, compared to baseline algorithms.