ProLoNets

Public implementation of "Encoding Human Domain Knowledge to Warm Start Reinforcement Learning" from AAAI'21

Requirements

Refer to the python38.txt file for the OpenAI gym environments and the sc2_requirements.txt file for the StarCraft II environments. As the name suggests, python38.txt builds on Python 3.8.10. In order to work with the SC2 environments, you must have Python >= 3.6, and then installing the requirements in the sc2_requirements.txt file should do it.

Running Experiments

All of the code to run various domains lives in the runfiles/ directory. All file involve a few command line arguments, which I'll review now:

• -a or --agent_type: Which agent should play through the domain. Details below. Default: prolo
• -e or --episodes: How many episodes to run for. Default: 1000
• -s or --sl_init: Should the agent be trained via imitation learning first? Only applies if agent_type is fc.Default: False
• -rand: Should the ProLoNet agent be randomly-initialized? Include flag to set to True.
• -deep: Should the ProLoNet include dynamic growth? Include flag to set to True.
• -adv: Should the ProLoNet be an "M-Mistake" agent? Include the flag to set to True. The probability itself is hard-coded in the ProLoNet file at line 35.
• --reproduce: Use pre-specified random seeds for lunar lander and cart pole? Include to indicate True, omit for False.

For the -a or --agent_type flag, valid options are:

• prolo for a normal ProLoNet agent
• random for random actions (not available in full game of StarCraftII)
• heuristic for the heuristic only (not available in the full game of StarCraftII)
• fc for a fully-connected agent
• lstm for an LSTM agent
• djinn for a DJINN agent

gym_runner.py

This file runs both of the OpenAI gym domains from the paper, namely cart pole and lunar lander. It has one additional command line argument:

• -env or --env_type: Which environment to run. Valid options are cart and lunar. Default: cart

This script will run with most any version of Python3 and the required packages. To ensure consistent results with the --reproduce flag, you must use Python 3.8.10 and the included python38.txt requirements and be on Ubuntu 20.04. Other operating systems have not been tested and may require additional tinkering or random seeding to reproduce results faithfully.

Running a ProLoNet agent on lunar lander for 1500 episodes looks like:

python gym_runner.py -a prolo -deep -e 1500 -env lunar

For the LOKI agent:

python gym_runner.py -a fc -e 1500 -env lunar -s

minigame_runner.py

This file runs the FindAndDefeatZerglings minigame from the SC2LE. Running this is exactly the same as the gym_runner.py runfile, with the exception that no --env_type flag exists for this domain. You must also have all of the StarCraft II setup complete, which means having a valid copy of StarCraft II, having Python >= 3.6, and installing the requirements from the sc2_requirements.txt file. For information on setting up StarCraft II, refer to Blizzard's Documentation and for the minigame itself, you'll need the map from DeepMind's repo.

Running a ProLoNet agent:

python minigame_runner.py -a prolo -deep -e 1000

And a fully-connected agent:

python minigame_runner.py -a fc -e 1000

And an LSTM agent:

python minigame_runner.py -a lstm -e 1000

And a DJINN agent:

python minigame_runner.py -a djinn -e 1000

sc_runner.py

This file runs the full SC2 game against in-game AI. In game AI difficulty is set on lines 836-838. Simply changing "Difficult.VeryEasy" to "Difficulty.Easy", "Difficulty.Medium", or "Difficulty.Hard" does the trick. Again, you'll need SC2 and all of the requirements for the appropriate Python environment, as discussed above. Running a ProLoNet agent:

python sc_runner.py -a prolo -e 500

And a random ProLoNet agent:

python sc_runner.py -a prolo -rand -e 500

Citation

If you use this project, please cite our work! Bibtex below:

@article{prolonets, 
title={Encoding Human Domain Knowledge to Warm Start Reinforcement Learning}, 
volume={35},
url={https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AAAI/article/view/16638},
abstractNote={Deep reinforcement learning has been successful in a variety of tasks, such as game playing and robotic manipulation. However, attempting to learn tabula rasa disregards the logical structure of many domains as well as the wealth of readily available knowledge from domain experts that could help "warm start" the learning process. We present a novel reinforcement learning technique that allows for intelligent initialization of a neural network weights and architecture. Our approach permits the encoding domain knowledge directly into a neural decision tree, and improves upon that knowledge with policy gradient updates. We empirically validate our approach on two OpenAI Gym tasks and two modified StarCraft 2 tasks, showing that our novel architecture outperforms multilayer-perceptron and recurrent architectures. Our knowledge-based framework finds superior policies compared to imitation learning-based and prior knowledge-based approaches. Importantly, we demonstrate that our approach can be used by untrained humans to initially provide >80\% increase in expected reward relative to baselines prior to training (p < 0.001), which results in a >60\% increase in expected reward after policy optimization (p = 0.011).}, 
number={6}, 
journal={Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
author={Silva, Andrew and Gombolay, Matthew},
year={2021},
month={5},
pages={5042-5050} }