Adversarial Imitation Learning With General Function Approximation: Theoretical Analysis and Practical Algorithms

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL, a technique where an AI learns to mimic expert behavior by competing against a discriminator network) has worked well in practice but lacked solid theoretical foundations except in oversimplified settings. This paper introduces OPT-AIL (optimization-based adversarial imitation learning), a new framework that works with general function approximation (flexible neural network models rather than simple lookup tables), and proves it can learn expert-level policies efficiently while remaining practical to implement.