## Basic Jupyter Setting

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from pprint import pprint

%matplotlib inline
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (10.0, 8.0) # set default size of plots
plt.rcParams['image.interpolation'] = 'nearest'
plt.rcParams['image.cmap'] = 'gray'


The autoreload extension is already loaded. To reload it, use:


## Setup the environment

Gridworld is widely used in RL environment. Gym-MiniGrid is custom GridWorld environment of OpenAI gym style. Before dive in this environment, you need to install both of them.

pip install gym
pip install gym-minigrid

At first, Let's look at some frames of MiniGrid.

import gym
import gym_minigrid

env = gym.make('MiniGrid-Empty-5x5-v0')
env.reset()
before_img = env.render('rgb_array')
action = env.actions.forward
obs, reward, done, info = env.step(action)
after_img = env.render('rgb_array')

plt.imshow(np.concatenate([before_img, after_img], 1));


This is the example of MiniGrid-Empty-5x5-v0 environment. There are some blank cells, and gray obstacle which the agent cannot pass it. And the green cell is the goal to reach. The ultimate goal of this environment (and most of RL problem) is to find the optimal policy with highest reward. In this case, well-trained agent should find the optimal path to reach the goal.

Let's move to more larger environment MiniGrid-Empty-8x8-v0, and find the information what we can get.

env = gym.make('MiniGrid-Empty-8x8-v0')

# Reset the environment
env.reset()

# Select the action right (sample action)
action = env.actions.right

# Take a step in the environment and store it in appropriate variables
obs, reward, done, info = env.step(action)

# Render the current state of the environment
img = env.render('rgb_array')

print('Observation:', obs)
print('Reward:', reward)
print('Done:', done)
print('Info:', info)
print('Image shape:', img.shape)
plt.imshow(img);

Observation: {'image': array([[[2, 5, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0]],

[[2, 5, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0]],

[[2, 5, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0]],

[[2, 5, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0],
[1, 0, 0]],

[[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0]],

[[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0]],

[[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0],
[2, 5, 0]]], dtype=uint8), 'direction': 1, 'mission': 'get to the green goal square'}
Reward: 0
Done: False
Info: {}
Image shape: (256, 256, 3)


As the agent take an action, environment (MiniGrid) will be changed with respect to action. If the agent want to find the optimal path, the agent should notice the difference between current state and next state while taking an action. To help this, the environment generates next state, reward, and terminal flags.

Some helper function offers to render the sample action in Jupyter Notebook.

import base64
import glob
import io
from IPython.display import HTML
from IPython import display

def show_video():
mp4list = glob.glob('video/*.mp4')
if len(mp4list) > 0:
mp4 = mp4list[0]
encoded = base64.b64encode(video)
display.display(HTML(data='''<video alt="test" autoplay
loop controls style="height: 400px;">
<source src="data:video/mp4;base64,{0}" type="video/mp4" />
</video>'''.format(encoded.decode('ascii'))))
else:
print("Could not find video")


To help agent training easily, MiniGrid offers FlatObsWrapper for flattening observation (in other words, 1D array)

import gym
from gym import spaces
from gym_minigrid.minigrid import OBJECT_TO_IDX, COLOR_TO_IDX

max_env_steps = 50

class FlatObsWrapper(gym.core.ObservationWrapper):
"""Fully observable gridworld returning a flat grid encoding."""

def __init__(self, env):
super().__init__(env)

# Since the outer walls are always present, we remove left, right, top, bottom walls
# from the observation space of the agent. There are 3 channels, but for simplicity
# in this assignment, we will deal with flattened version of state.

self.observation_space = spaces.Box(
low=0,
high=255,
shape=((self.env.width-2) * (self.env.height-2) * 3,),  # number of cells
dtype='uint8'
)
self.unwrapped.max_steps = max_env_steps

def observation(self, obs):
# this method is called in the step() function to get the observation
# we provide code that gets the grid state and places the agent in it
env = self.unwrapped
full_grid = env.grid.encode()
full_grid[env.agent_pos[0]][env.agent_pos[1]] = np.array([
OBJECT_TO_IDX['agent'],
COLOR_TO_IDX['red'],
env.agent_dir
])
full_grid = full_grid[1:-1, 1:-1]   # remove outer walls of the environment (for efficiency)

flattened_grid = full_grid.ravel()
return flattened_grid

def render(self, *args, **kwargs):
"""This removes the default visualization of the partially observable field of view."""
kwargs['highlight'] = False
return self.unwrapped.render(*args, **kwargs)


So It's time to run with sample action!

env = FlatObsWrapper(gym.make('MiniGrid-Empty-8x8-v0'))

# Reset the environment
env.reset()

# Select the action right
action = env.actions.right

# Take a step in the environment and store it in appropriate variables
obs, reward, done, info = env.step(action)

# Render the current state of the environment
img = env.render('rgb_array')
################# YOUR CODE ENDS HERE ###############################

print('Observation:', obs, ', Observation Shape: ', obs.shape)
print('Reward:', reward)
print('Done:', done)
print('Info:', info)
print('Image shape:', img.shape)
plt.imshow(img);

Observation: [10  0  1  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0
1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0
1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0
1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0
1  0  0  1  0  0  1  0  0  8  1  0] , Observation Shape:  (108,)
Reward: 0
Done: False
Info: {}
Image shape: (256, 256, 3)


As you can see it in observation, the dimension of observation is changed from 2D to 1D. Using this observation, we will make some kind of neural network to help agent to notice the observation. Let's check the real-time video of random movement.

from gym.wrappers import Monitor

# Monitor is a gym wrapper, which helps easy rendering of videos of the wrapped environment.
def wrap_env(env):
env = Monitor(env, './video', force=True)
return env

def gen_wrapped_env(env_name):
return wrap_env(FlatObsWrapper(gym.make(env_name)))


Currently, OpenAI Gym offers several utils to help understanding the training progress. Monitor is one of that tool to log the history data. If we set the rendering option to rgb_array, the video data will be stored in specific path. (Maybe it requires some additional apps such as ffmpeg)

## Test with Random Policy

class RandPolicy:
def __init__(self, action_space):
self.action_space = action_space

def act(self, *unused_args):
return self.action_space.sample(), None


At first, we want check the operation of environment-agent interaction. To do this, Random Policy that generates the "random action" is defined. This policy just generates random action from pre-defined action space. And then run it.

Note that pytorch_policy flag is set to False as a default. But to implement the policy gradient, the gradient calculation is required, and pytorch will be used.

def log_policy_rollout(policy, env_name, pytorch_policy=False):
# Create environment with flat observation
env = gen_wrapped_env(env_name)

# Initialize environment
observation = env.reset()

done = False
episode_reward = 0
episode_length = 0

# Run until done == True
while not done:
# Take a step
if pytorch_policy:
observation = torch.tensor(observation, dtype=torch.float32)
action = policy.act(observation)[0].data.cpu().numpy()
else:
action = policy.act(observation)[0]
observation, reward, done, info = env.step(action)

episode_reward += reward
episode_length += 1

print('Total reward:', episode_reward)
print('Total length:', episode_length)

env.close()

show_video()

# Test that the logging function is working
test_env_name = 'MiniGrid-Empty-8x8-v0'
rand_policy = RandPolicy(FlatObsWrapper(gym.make(test_env_name)).action_space)
log_policy_rollout(rand_policy, test_env_name)

Total reward: 0
Total length: 50


That's the agent work with Random Policy. We found out that Random Policy is not optimal policy since the agent (the red one) cannot reach the goal.(or maybe it'll reach the goal after infinite times go on...) So to reach the goal, it requires more intelligent policy. In natural sense of mind, it needs,

• Remember the previous trajectory
• When it goes to unknown cell, based on the experience with memory, use it to find the way to goal

## Implement Rollout Buffer

Before implementing Policy Gradient, it requires to implement memory object to store the previous trajectory or information offered from environment. Sometimes, it is called "Replay Buffer" or "Rollout Buffer", but in this page, RolloutBuffer will be used for expression. To implement Rollout Buffer, we need to consider such that,

• how many trajectories stored in buffer?
• how to add trajectory into the buffer?
• (In view of Reinforcement Learning) how to calculate the future reward based on previous reward
• (+) how to sample the trajectory efficiently?

So this is RolloutBuffer implementation!

from torch.utils.data.sampler import BatchSampler, SubsetRandomSampler

class RolloutBuffer():
def __init__(self, rollout_size, obs_size):
self.rollout_size = rollout_size
self.obs_size = obs_size
self.reset()

def insert(self, step, done, action, log_prob, reward, obs):
self.done[step].copy_(done)
self.actions[step].copy_(action)
self.log_probs[step].copy_(log_prob)
self.rewards[step].copy_(reward)
self.obs[step].copy_(obs)

def reset(self):
self.done = torch.zeros(self.rollout_size, 1)
self.returns = torch.zeros(self.rollout_size + 1, 1, requires_grad=False)
# Assuming Discrete Action Space
self.actions = torch.zeros(self.rollout_size, 1, dtype=torch.int64)
self.log_probs = torch.zeros(self.rollout_size, 1)
self.rewards = torch.zeros(self.rollout_size, 1)
self.obs = torch.zeros(self.rollout_size, self.obs_size)

def compute_returns(self, gamma):
# Compute Returns until the last finished episode
self.last_done = (self.done == 1).nonzero().max()
self.returns[self.last_done + 1] = 0.

# Accumulate discounted returns
for step in reversed(range(self.last_done + 1)):
self.returns[step] = self.returns[step + 1] * \
gamma * (1 - self.done[step]) + self.rewards[step]

def batch_sampler(self, batch_size, get_old_log_probs=False):
sampler = BatchSampler(
SubsetRandomSampler(range(self.last_done)),
batch_size,
drop_last=True)
for indices in sampler:
if get_old_log_probs:
yield self.actions[indices], self.returns[indices], self.obs[indices], self.log_probs[indices]
else:
yield self.actions[indices], self.returns[indices], self.obs[indices]


There are couple of things to notice that,

• All information stored in RolloutBuffer should get the type of torch.Tensor
• In this case, returns will be used for minimizing the loss. So returns object should set the requires_grad to True
• It is inefficient to use all information to train the policy. To handle it, it requires something special sampling strategy. In this code, BatchSample is used.

## Construct Policy Network

Now that we can store rollouts we need a policy to collect them. In the following you will complete the provided base code for the policy class. The policy is instantiated as a small neural network with simple fully-connected layers, the ActorNetwork. The role of policy is sort of strategy that generates the action. (Actually, it is just the probability to generate the action). And Of course, the important work through ActorNetwork is to update policy per each iteration. With pytorch, we need to define,

• What optimizer should we use?
• How can we define the loss function?

$$\nabla J(\theta) = \mathbb{E}_{\pi}\big[ \nabla_{\theta} \log \pi_{\theta}(a, s) \; V_t(s) \big]$$

Here, $\theta$ are the parameters of the policy network $\pi_{\theta}$ and $V_t(s)$ is the observed future discounted reward from state $s$ onwards which should be maximized (we need to focus on this keyword, since the purpose of neural network training is to minimize the loss, not maximize). So anyway we need the calculate the gradient of $\log \pi_{\theta}(a, s)$ and calculate its mean.

And Plus, there are some approaches to enhance the exploration. If we can consider the entropy loss to handle the overall loss, it takes diverse action. At that case gradient fuction will be,

$$\nabla J(\theta) = \mathbb{E}_{\pi}\big[ \nabla_{\theta} \log \pi_{\theta}(a, s) \; V_t(s) \big] + \nabla_{\theta}\mathcal{H}\big[\pi_\theta(a, s)\big]$$

And here is the implementation of Actor Network (and it's quite simple!)

import torch
import torch.nn as nn

class ActorNetwork(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, num_inputs, num_actions, hidden_dim):
super().__init__()
self.num_actions = num_actions

self.fc = nn.Sequential(
nn.Linear(num_inputs, hidden_dim),
nn.Tanh(),
nn.Linear(hidden_dim, hidden_dim),
nn.Tanh(),
nn.Linear(hidden_dim, num_actions)
)

def forward(self, state):
x = self.fc(state)
return x


And Below is the implementation of Policy. We select the Adam Optimizer

import torch.optim as optim
import torch.nn.functional as F
from torch.distributions.categorical import Categorical
from utils.utils import count_model_params

class Policy():
def __init__(self, num_inputs, num_actions, hidden_dim, learning_rate,
batch_size, policy_epochs, entropy_coef=0.001):
self.actor = ActorNetwork(num_inputs, num_actions, hidden_dim)
self.batch_size = batch_size
self.policy_epochs = policy_epochs
self.entropy_coef = entropy_coef

def act(self, state):
logits = self.actor(state)
# To generate the probability of action, we assume its state has categorical distribution.
dist = Categorical(logits=logits)
action = dist.sample()
log_prob = dist.log_prob(action)
return action, log_prob

def evaluate_actions(self, state, action):
logits = self.actor(state)
dist = Categorical(logits=logits)
log_prob = dist.log_prob(action.squeeze(-1)).view(-1, 1)
entropy = dist.entropy().view(-1, 1)
return log_prob, entropy

def update(self, rollouts):
for epoch in range(self.policy_epochs):
data = rollouts.batch_sampler(self.batch_size)

for sample in data:
actions_batch, returns_batch, obs_batch = sample

log_probs_batch, entropy_batch = self.evaluate_actions(obs_batch, actions_batch)

# Compute the mean loss for the policy update using
# action log-probabilities and policy returns
policy_loss = -(log_probs_batch * returns_batch).mean()
# Compute the mean entropy for the policy update
entropy_loss = -entropy_batch.mean()

loss = policy_loss + self.entropy_coef * entropy_loss

loss.backward(retain_graph=False)
self.optimizer.step()

@property
def num_params(self):
return count_model_params(self.actor)

from IPython.display import clear_output
from utils.utils import AverageMeter, plot_learning_curve
import time

def train(env, rollouts, policy, params, seed=123):
# SETTING SEED: it is good practice to set seeds when running experiments to keep results comparable
np.random.seed(seed)
torch.manual_seed(seed)
env.seed(seed)

rollout_time, update_time = AverageMeter(), AverageMeter()  # Loggers
rewards, success_rate = [], []

print("Training model with {} parameters...".format(policy.num_params))

# Training Loop
## Initialization
avg_eps_reward, avg_success_rate = AverageMeter(), AverageMeter()
done = False
prev_obs = env.reset()
prev_obs = torch.tensor(prev_obs, dtype=torch.float32)
eps_reward = 0.
start_time = time.time()

## Collect rollouts
for step in range(rollouts.rollout_size):
if done:
# Store episode statistics
avg_eps_reward.update(eps_reward)
if 'success' in info:
avg_success_rate.update(int(info['success']))

# Reset Environment
obs = env.reset()
obs = torch.tensor(obs, dtype=torch.float32)
eps_reward = 0.
else:
obs = prev_obs

action, log_prob = policy.act(obs)
obs, reward, done, info = env.step(action)

rollouts.insert(step, torch.tensor(done, dtype=torch.float32), action, log_prob,
torch.tensor(reward, dtype=torch.float32),
prev_obs)

prev_obs = torch.tensor(obs, dtype=torch.float32)
eps_reward += reward

# Use the rollout buffer's function to compute the returns for all stored rollout steps. (requires just 1 line)
rollouts.compute_returns(params['discount'])

rollout_done_time = time.time()

# Call the policy's update function using the collected rollouts
policy.update(rollouts)

update_done_time = time.time()
rollouts.reset()

## log metrics
rewards.append(avg_eps_reward.avg)
if avg_success_rate.count > 0:
success_rate.append(avg_success_rate.avg)
rollout_time.update(rollout_done_time - start_time)
update_time.update(update_done_time - rollout_done_time)
print('it {}: avgR: {:.3f} -- rollout_time: {:.3f}sec -- update_time: {:.3f}sec'.format(j,
avg_eps_reward.avg,
rollout_time.avg,
update_time.avg))
if j % params.plotting_iters == 0 and j != 0:
log_policy_rollout(policy, params.env_name, pytorch_policy=True)
clear_output()   # this removes all training outputs to keep the notebook clean, DON'T REMOVE THIS LINE!
return rewards, success_rate

from utils.utils import ParamDict
import copy

def instantiate(params_in, nonwrapped_env=None):
params = copy.deepcopy(params_in)

if nonwrapped_env is None:
nonwrapped_env = gym.make(params.env_name)

env = None
env = FlatObsWrapper(nonwrapped_env)
obs_size = env.observation_space.shape[0]
num_actions = env.action_space.n

rollouts = RolloutBuffer(params.rollout_size, obs_size)
policy_class = params.policy_params.pop('policy_class')

policy = policy_class(obs_size, num_actions, **params.policy_params)
return env, rollouts, policy

policy_params = ParamDict(
policy_class = Policy,    # Policy class to use (replaced later)
hidden_dim = 32,          # dimension of the hidden state in actor network
learning_rate = 1e-3,     # learning rate of policy update
batch_size = 1024,        # batch size for policy update
policy_epochs = 4,        # number of epochs per policy update
entropy_coef = 0.001,     # hyperparameter to vary the contribution of entropy loss
)
params = ParamDict(
policy_params = policy_params,
rollout_size = 2050,      # number of collected rollout steps per policy update
num_updates = 50,         # number of training policy iterations
discount = 0.99,          # discount factor
plotting_iters = 10,      # interval for logging graphs and policy rollouts
env_name = 'MiniGrid-Empty-5x5-v0',  # we are using a tiny environment here for testing
)

env, rollouts, policy = instantiate(params)
rewards, success_rate = train(env, rollouts, policy, params)
print("Training completed!")

Training completed!

plot_learning_curve(rewards, success_rate, params.num_updates)
for _ in range(3):
log_policy_rollout(policy, params.env_name, pytorch_policy=True)

Total reward: 0.874
Total length: 7

Total reward: 0.91
Total length: 5

Total reward: 0.874
Total length: 7