
Report: Tesla using behavior cloning/supervised imitation learning for Autopilot - strangecosmos
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/what-makes-teslas-autopilot-different
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strangecosmos
Key excerpt:

“Tesla’s cars collect so much camera and other sensor data as they drive
around, even when Autopilot isn’t turned on, that the Autopilot team can
examine what traditional human driving looks like in various driving scenarios
and mimic it, said the person familiar with the system. It uses this
information as an additional factor to plan how a car will drive in specific
situations—for example, how to steer a curve on a road or avoid an object.
Such an approach has its limits, of course: behavior cloning, as the method is
sometimes called…

But Tesla’s engineers believe that by putting enough data from good human
driving through a neural network, that network can learn how to directly
predict the correct steering, braking and acceleration in most situations.
“You don’t need anything else” to teach the system how to drive autonomously,
said a person who has been involved with the team. They envision a future in
which humans won’t need to write code to tell the car what to do when it
encounters a particular scenario; it will know what to do on its own.”

In this context, behavior cloning (or behavioral cloning) most likely means
supervised imitation learning. That means training a neural network on a
dataset of world states labelled with drivers’ actions. After training on
these state/action pairs, the neural network attempts to predict the correct
action for each state it encounters. (Detailed explanation:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06699](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06699))

Here’s a great visualization of how Tesla currently sees world states:
[https://youtu.be/qgBBTDu1rzk](https://youtu.be/qgBBTDu1rzk)

Waymo did a small-scale experiment with supervised imitation learning, which
they wrote about here:
[https://link.medium.com/D5XORBIgQT](https://link.medium.com/D5XORBIgQT) They
also published a paper:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03079](https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.03079)

What do machine learning people think of this approach?

