Provably Efficient Policy-Reward Co-Pretraining for Adversarial Imitation Learning

Adversarial imitation learning (AIL) achieves high-quality imitation compared to behavioral cloning (BC), but demands substantial online environment interaction. Recent empirical work has explored initializing AIL algorithms with BCpretrained policies to address this limitation, yet a rigorous theoretical understanding of pretraining's role in AIL remains elusive. This paper provides a systematic theoretical analysis and introduces principled pretraining algorithms for accelerating AIL. We begin by analyzing AIL with policy pretraining alone, identifying reward error as the dominant source of suboptimality. This reveals a critical and previously overlooked gap: the absence of reward pretraining. Motivated by this finding, we develop a principled policy-reward co-pretraining approach grounded in a rewardshaping analysis. Our analysis uncovers a fundamental connection between expert policies and shaping rewards, which naturally gives rise to CoPT-AIL, an approach that jointly pretrains both policy and reward through a single BC procedure. We prove that CoPT-AIL achieves an improved imitation gap bound over standard AIL, establishing the first theoretical guarantee for the benefits of pretraining in AIL. Experimental results confirm CoPT-AIL's superior performance over existing AIL methods. Recent work has proposed incorporating reward pretraining to overcome this limitation (Watson et al., 2023; Yue et al., 2024) . Specifically, Watson et al. (2023) pretrains a reward under which the BC policy becomes optimal, while