Imitation learning – Definition & Meaning

Definition of imitation learning

: a way of training an AI system or robot to perform a task by learning from examples of an expert's behavior, such as recorded human actions or teleoperated robot trajectories
- The warehouse robot learned the picking task through imitation learning from expert demonstrations.
- Imitation learning gave the humanoid a useful starting policy before reinforcement learning improved it in simulation.

Origin & history

first known use1999

Learning robots from human demonstrations had been studied earlier, but Stefan Schaal's 1999 review Is imitation learning the route to humanoid robots? helped establish imitation learning as a standard term in modern AI and robotics.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of imitation learning?

Related terms

teleoperation the remote control of a robot or machine by a human operator, often through a headset… reinforcement learning a way of training in which a model tries actions, receives rewards or penalties, and gradually… training data the collection of examples, observations, labels, actions, or feedback that a model learns… humanoid robot a robot with a roughly human body shape, including legs, arms, and often hands, designed to… physical AI AI that understands and acts in the physical world, powering robots, self-driving cars… vision-language-action model a model that takes in camera images and spoken or written instructions and directly outputs… synthetic data training data generated by AI models or simulations rather than collected from the real world human-in-the-loop describing a system in which a person reviews, approves, or corrects an AI's work at key…

Cite this entry

"Imitation learning." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/imitation-learning/. Accessed 11 Oct. 2026.