Hi, I'm trying to understand how to use tensorforce but i think i am missing something. For example why when i try to run
runner = Runner(
agent="ppo",
environment="CartPole-v1",
num_parallel=2
)
runner.run(num_episodes=300)it works fine, but if try
runner = Runner(
agent="a2c",
environment="CartPole-v1",
num_parallel=2
)
runner.run(num_episodes=300)it raises
tensorforce.exception.TensorforceError: Invalid value for agent argument update given parallel_interactions > 1: {'unit': 'timesteps', 'batch_size': 10}.what am i missing here?
Shall i open an issue or is it supposed to beheave this way?
Hi, there are not many, unfortunately. However, the code would look similar in most cases, and instead the variation will mainly be in the agent arguments, and for this it's hard to provide a lot of proven guidelines (although there could be more, admittedly). For which aspect would you like to see more examples? Maybe I can add some or at least point you somewhere (sometimes the unittests can be useful, for instance).
Thanks Alexander! I'm trying to start small, to make an environment analagous to a room, heater and thermostat. In keras, I took the REINFORCE model from Geron's Hands On book and made an environment that has a room that decays over time to 0 degF (with a time constant) when the heater is off, rises over time to 10 degF (with the same time constant) when the heater is on, and a reward function that is 0 between 4 and 6 degF, and a linear decreasing reward as the temperature is outside of that band. The heater can either be on or off, so the RL agent will be turning the heater on and off as the temperature gets too high or too low. I made a simple NN to learn that, and I'd like to see an example of how I would implement the same in tensorforce. I see the general layout in the "Getting started" part, and think I can start down the path, but it would be nice to have an example that has some more specifics filled in to follow. I think this would be a decent prototype of a non-videogame sort, and a reasonable model in the industrial setting to start to wrap our heads around. Thank you for your offer to help, and I am willing to do what I can -- if you have a skeleton you think you could put together, I'd be happy to make more embellishments and contribute back as an example if it could be put into an example library or something.
Here's an image of what it looks like when the heater is on, then off. It shows characteristic decay and lag in approaching max temp. The scale is 0-50 here, but I can scale down to 0-10: https://ibb.co/k8P6GCz
And here is how my RL model learned to control the temperature to be within the band, with a single neuron sigmoid activiation function learned via the REINFORCE algorithm (or, the one laid out in Geron). It shows a bunch of different episodes starting from different initial temperatures: https://ibb.co/LSt3rrQ
Yes, that looks like a nice starter example. I assume the "getting started" guide covers sufficiently how you can either use an existing e.g. Gym environment, or define your own so that other parts of Tensorforce can interface with it. It also covers what the basic training loop looks like and/or how to use the Runner utility. Would you say there are things missing here? Otherwise, I think the main part is that the docs currently offer almost no guidance on how to choose which algorithm and what hyperparameters. Is that where you think more could be added? I can certainly add a bit here, it would probably be based on PPO for now, as I used it most and many users end up using it. I'm also planning for a while already to write more about the full Tensorforce configuration, but shamefully haven't done so yet. >.< Contributions for the examples folder, problem-based tutorial walkthroughs, etc are always very welcome -- it's certainly a part which I'm not covering well enough. :-)
I'd say the example defining the CustomEnvironment could use some more explanation, and maybe another example or two. Some more description of what the return of the
state() and actions() gives would help. Are they just dicts that describe the type of the return value? What would it look like if the states or actions are not discreet, but continuous? A little more explanation in the comments to the example class would be helpful. The documentation for these methods has information on what I asked above, but again, a little language around the intent of these fields examples exercising these options would be helpful.
And as you mentioned, if you were to do a simple thermostatic controller example, a quick explanation of why you chose the agent you did (among the choices of possible agents) would be good. It doesn't have to be a full-blown RL tutorial, as you can expect users to at least be familiar with the general concept, but maybe not with each of the different choices for agent types and what their practical implications are. They (I) have likely read about them briefly and are coming to this software to try them out for the first time. Or at least, a good subset are...
I have been trying hard to get it work, if you can share example code that would be highly appreciated. Thanks a bunch 😊.
If that's not quite what you want to do, can you specify what exactly you tried and didn't work?
I put a dead simple example of a room temperature that responds (with thermal resistance) to a heater at the following link. It has the formula for simple exponential resistance, and a plot of what the room temperature looks like when the heater is on vs. off: https://github.com/mpettis/shared-scratchpad/blob/master/thermostat-response/thermostatic-response-function.ipynb
Another place a tutorial example would be good... I'm defining an environment, and I want to, say, initialize my environment with a starting temperature. The sample isn't clear on how I pass initialization parameters to my environment creation. I also want to augment the class to have custom attributes in addition to what the base environment class has. But I can't see how to do that. Evironment.create() seems to return an EnvironmentWrapper class, and it doesn't have the custom attributes I set in the
__init__() definition of Environment when I run a dir() on my created object.
@AlexKuhnle hi, i believe
level is for standard openai gym envs. What i meant was that i am following the same structure as openai gym but made my custom env having same abstract class (which you are check here). So my doubt is how to i make it work with tensorforce
i guess you mean i should use this could you please write simply the syntax of the environment assuming the gym based custom env has name
should it be
mmxshould it be
environment =OpenAIGym(level=mmx)
OK, I made a stab at creating a bang-bang heater environment by extending the Environment class. I think I did it mostly correctly, and had to add things like incrementing a timestep. I think this (or a cleaned-up version with someone who know more) could be a good example of implementing an Environment from the base class. https://github.com/mpettis/shared-scratchpad/blob/master/thermostat-response/thermostat-environment.ipynb
@MakGulati If you're using the same interface, is there a reason why you don't just use the
gym.Env base class? Your environment class could be class MMX(gym.Env): ..., and if you then pass it to the Tensorforce Gym interface, it should be compatible: env = Environment.create(environment='gym', level=MMX, ...). Or have you tried this before? The level argument should certainly accept custom gym.Env subclass objects, and in fact also instances.
@mpettis As mentioned in your issue, the only thing missing -- which is not clear right now from the exception, but will change -- is the
environment.reset() before starting to execute. Apart from that you shouldn't need to add attributes or so when using Environment.create(...) (which, I'd say, is the preferred way of initializing an env). I will also add an attribute forwarding for the wrapper, however, it will be readonly which I think should be enough (environment logic should go into the env implementation itself).
It would also be great if you would be willing to contribute your little environment plus agent training script under
examples/ :-)
(Plus appropriate acknowledgement, if you're happy to do so, of course)
Like CartPole, for instance, is specifying it here. If you do the same, can you post your observation/action space?
@AlexKuhnle I will work on a custom environment and agent training loop, and you are more than welcome to include the example. Let me know how you want it contributed -- I would guess as a pull request? I'll probably need some guidance on it, let me know if doing so via this channel, or on issues on your git repo, or on a fork of it i would make would be the easiest venue for you.
@mpettis Yes, PR is best. You can fork the repo, then commit to your private fork, then from there on Github create the PR to the main repo. Happy to help along the way. Generally, re issue vs Gitter, I would say: if you think it's a problem which others may encounter, too, an issue is preferred, so others can search for it. If it's more discussion, question on PR, suggestions, I would say here is fine (or private message).
@AlexKuhnle I'll be doing a pull request, but before I do, here is the proposed full example. It is a jupyter notebook because I wanted to expand on the example and make some inline charts to help with explanation, not sure if you want examples in notebook form. I can change to a python script if that would be preferred. But you can take a prelim look at it here: https://github.com/mpettis/tensorforce/blob/master/examples/temperature-controller.ipynb
Thanks very much, @mpettis, and the acknowledgement is of course perfectly fine. Feel free to also add an acknowledgement to the README here if you end up contributing more (which I would, obvs, encourage :-).
29 replies
For agents, is there documentation (or explanation) of what "memory" does and how it is used? I'm trying to make an example that learns not to turn the heater on too frequently in a thermostat example (basing off my previous example above), like, say, learns to not turn the heater on more than 3 times in 20 consecutive timesteps. It's not learning the way I think it should, when the reward signal is just the distance the temperature is away from the target temperature band, and a large 10x - 100x negative reward if it turns the heater on more than 3 times in 20 timesteps. I would assume that I would not have to expose a state back to the agent that tracks the available heater-on actions available at the current step, but assuming the agent would learn such a policy. I am using a tensorforce agent with a 'policy_gradient' objective, like in the 'getting started' section.
I am working on an example that I can link to that has more details if someone is interested in looking into this. But I think that my question about what's going on with memory can stand alone without the example.
You've probably found the basic documentation but otherwise here. Basically, memory is the mechanism to store experience and how to sample batches of it for an update.
recent is a simple buffering mechanism which samples the latest timesteps, replay randomly samples from a usually bigger pool of timesteps, as known from DQN. But this is not what you're looking for.
It's actually not uncommon that people indeed expose a specially preprocessed state back to the agent -- and if it's possible and helps, why not. However, this is obvs unsatisfying, and the way I would say this should be solved is by using an RNN layer which is unrolled over the sequence of timesteps.
In Tensorforce there is, for instance,
internal_lstm, and the internals arguments are related to that. They give the agent an internal state, and consequently the ability to remember what happened earlier in an episode (in theory -- and yes, many DRL models don't have this).
So that's what I would try. I would definitely be interested to hear how it goes. Unfortunately it's a rather involved feature, so it may not be super-easy to get it to train properly.
That makes a lot of sense, and the way I was thinking about it (but was unsure if some newer model in this catalog could take care of not having to expose external state), and knowing that others have to do the same state exposure is helpful. It's good to know that
internal_lstm exists, and I'll keep it in mind, but I think I have to do a lot more practice on just the basics before I get to that. So I'm going to try and do as you suggested, and just explicitly expose that state myself. I think I will be able to contribute this as an example too, but it really won't be much different than my other example, and you probably want some examples that exercise other features of the framework...