Reinforcement learning & imitation learning: A comparative analysis

Reinforcement learning powers DeepMind's MuZero, AlphaStar, Agent57 etc., while imitation learning is at the heart of Waymo's self-driving cars. But what exactly are these two training methods, and how do they stack up against each other? Let's find out. What is reinforcement learning?  Reinforcement learning refers to how a model learns to perform a task through repeated trial-and-error interactions in a dynamic environment. The systems learn to make decisions based on a reward function without human intervention and explicit programming. RL is considered a viable path to AGI as it does not depend on historical data sets. To that end, tech companies like Facebook, Google, DeepMind, Amazon, and Microsoft have committed substantial resources to pushing the frontiers of RL. The go