Last August, we announced Dopamine, our framework for flexible reinforcement learning. For the initial version we decided to focus on a specific type of RL research: value-based agents evaluated on the Atari 2600 framework supported by the Arcade Learning Environment. We were thrilled to see how well it was received by the community, including a live coding session, its inclusion in a recently-announced benchmark for RL, considered as the top “Cool new open source project of 2018” by the Octoverse, and over 7K GitHub stars on our repository.
One of the most common requests we have received is support for more environments. This confirms what we have seen internally, where simpler environments, such as those supported by OpenAI’s Gym, are incredibly useful when testing out new algorithms. We are happy to announce Dopamine 2.0, which includes support for discrete-domain gym environments (e.g. discrete states and actions). The core of the framework remains unchanged, we have simply generalized the interface with the environment. For backwards compatibility, users will still be able to download version 1.0.
We include default configurations for two classic control environments: CartPole and Acrobot; on these environments one can train a Dopamine agent in minutes. When compared with the training time for a standard Atari 2600 game (around 5 days on a standard GPU), these environments allow researchers to iterate much faster on research ideas before testing them out on larger Atari games. We also include a Colaboratory that illustrates how to train an agent on Cartpole and Acrobot. Finally, our GymPreprocessing class serves as an example for how to use Dopamine with other custom environments.
We are excited by the new opportunities enabled by Dopamine 2.0, and look forward to seeing what the research community creates with it!
By Pablo Samuel Castro and Marc G. Bellemare, Dopamine Team
