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Greedy AC

The official codebase for the paper Greedy Actor-Critic: A New Conditional Cross-Entropy Method for Policy Improvement.

Installing Dependencies

To install dependencies, run:

pip install -r requirements.txt

Running the Code

This codebase works by reading json configuration files and running the experiments which are outlined by those configuration files. When running an experiment, you need to specify two configuration files, one for the algorithm and one for the environment. Examples configuration files for algorithms and environments can be found in ./config/agent and ./config/environment respectively.

Experiments are run using the main.py file. To run this file, simply use the following code examples:

python3 main.py --agent-json AGENT_JSON --env-json ENV_JSON --index INDEX --save-dir SAVE_DIR

where AGENT_JSON is the path to an algorithm's configuration file, ENV_JSON is the path to an environment's configuration file, and INDEX is an integer representing the hyperparameter setting in the agent configuration file to use. Data from the experiment will be saved at ./results/SAVE_DIR.

For more information, see python3 main.py --help

Combining Mutiple Outputs

When you run many experiments, you may end up with many different data files. For example, if you run

for i in $(seq 0 2); do
	python3 main.py --agent-json config/agent/GreedyAC.json --env-json config/enviroment/AcrobotContinuous-v1.json --index 0 --save-dir "output"
done

You'll end up with three files in the output directory:

AcrobotContinuous-v1_GreedyAC_data_0.pkl
AcrobotContinuous-v1_GreedyAC_data_1.pkl
AcrobotContinuous-v1_GreedyAC_data_2.pkl

To combine all these files into one, you can do the following:

./combine.py output/combined.pkl output/

This will combine all the files in output to produce a single combined.pkl file. If you run ls output, you'll see:

AcrobotContinuous-v1_GreedyAC_data_0.pkl
AcrobotContinuous-v1_GreedyAC_data_1.pkl
AcrobotContinuous-v1_GreedyAC_data_2.pkl
combined.pkl

You can now safely delete the three individual data files, as they have been combined into the single combined.pkl data file.

Configuration Files

Environment Configuration Files

Environment configuration files describe the environment to use for an experiment. For example, here is an environment configuration file for the MountainCarContinuous-v0 environment:

{
    "env_name": "MountainCarContinuous-v0",
    "total_timesteps": 100000,
    "steps_per_episode": 1000,
    "eval_interval_timesteps": 10000,
    "eval_episodes": 5,
    "gamma": 0.99,
    "overwrite_rewards": false,
    "continuous": true,
    "rewards": {},
    "start_state": []
}

This configuration file specifies that we should run an experiment for 100,000 timesteps, with episodes cut off at 1,000 timesteps. We will run offline evaluation every 10,000 steps using 5 episodes. Online evaluation is always recorded, but offline evaluation may not be recorded if eval_episodes = 0 or eval_interval_timesteps > total_timesteps.

It is also possible to override the stating state of the environment and override the environment's rewards. For example, to create a cost-to-goal version of MountainCarContinuous-v0, we could set overwrite_rewards = true and rewards = {"goal": -1, "timestep": -1}.

Algorithm Configuration File

Algorithm configuration files are a bit more complicated than environment configuration files. These configuration files can be found in ./config/agent.

An example algorithm configuration file is:

{
    "algo_name": "example_algo",
    "hyper1": [1, 2, 3],
	"hyper2": [4, 5, 6]
}

This configuration file outlines 9 different hyperparameter configurations for algorithm example_algo, one hyperparameter setting for each combination of "hyper1" and "hyper2". We refer to these combinations with 0-based indexing:

  • index 0 has hyper1 = 1 and hyper2 = 4
  • index 1 has hyper1 = 2 and hyper2 = 4
  • index 2 has hyper1 = 3 and hyper2 = 4
  • index 3 has hyper1 = 1 and hyper2 = 5
  • index 4 has hyper1 = 2 and hyper2 = 5
  • index 5 has hyper1 = 3 and hyper2 = 5
  • index 6 has hyper1 = 1 and hyper2 = 6
  • index 7 has hyper1 = 2 and hyper2 = 6
  • index 8 has hyper1 = 3 and hyper2 = 6

When running experiments from the command line, you specify this index using the --index option. A single run of the experiment will then be executed using the associated hyperparameter setting. To run multiple hyperparameter settings in parallel, you can use GNU Parallel

One data file will be saved each time you run an experiment. To combine these individual data files into a single data file, you can use the combine.py script:

python3 combine.py SAVE_FILE PATH_TO_DATA_DIR

where PATH_TO_DATA_DIR is the path to the directory holding all the individual data files to combine and SAVE_FILE is the desired path/filename of the resulting file combined data file.

Citing

If you use this code or reference our work, please cite:

@inproceedings{neumann2023greedy,
	title = {Greedy Actor-Critic: A New Conditional Cross-Entropy Method for
	Policy Improvement},
	author = {Neumann, Samuel and Lim, Sungsu and Joseph, Ajin and Yangchen, Pan and White, Adam and White, Martha},
	year = {2023}
	journal = {International Conference on Learning Representations},
}