I have not read the paper you link, but I have this expectation about it: that the limitation of imitation learning is proved in a context that lacks richness compared to imitating language.
My intuition is: I have experience myself of failing to learn just from imitating an expert playing a game the best way possible. But if someone explains to me their actions, I can then learn something.
Language is flexible and recursive: you can in principle represent anything out of the real world in language, including language itself, and how to think. If somehow the learner manages to tap into recursiveness, it can shortcut the levels. It will learn how to act meaningfully not because it has covered all the possible examples of long-term sequences that lead to a goal, but because it has seen many schemes that map to how the expert thinks.
I can not learn chess efficiently by observing a grandmaster play many matches and jotting down all the moves. I could do it if the grandmaster was a short program if implemented in chess moves.
I have not read the paper you link, but I have this expectation about it: that the limitation of imitation learning is proved in a context that lacks richness compared to imitating language.
My intuition is: I have experience myself of failing to learn just from imitating an expert playing a game the best way possible. But if someone explains to me their actions, I can then learn something.
Language is flexible and recursive: you can in principle represent anything out of the real world in language, including language itself, and how to think. If somehow the learner manages to tap into recursiveness, it can shortcut the levels. It will learn how to act meaningfully not because it has covered all the possible examples of long-term sequences that lead to a goal, but because it has seen many schemes that map to how the expert thinks.
I can not learn chess efficiently by observing a grandmaster play many matches and jotting down all the moves. I could do it if the grandmaster was a short program if implemented in chess moves.