Definition
Plain language
Teaching an AI to copy recorded expert actions, one situation at a time.
As stated in the literature
An imitation-learning method that trains a policy via supervised next-action prediction over expert demonstrations; prone to compounding error when the agent visits states absent from the demonstration distribution, since flawless experts never demonstrate recovery from mistakes.
Why it matters: It's a simple way to bootstrap skills from demonstrations, but it leaves an agent helpless in situations the expert never stumbled into.
For example, an AI driving assistant trained only on recordings of smooth expert driving has never seen how to recover once it drifts toward the curb.
Heard on the show
“It tried behavior cloning — that's "watch the demos and imitate them" — and then several flavors of reinforcement learning, which is learning by trial and reward.”Episode 159 — Can a Coding Agent Run Its Own Robot Experiments Overnight, With No Human Resetting the Scene?