stable-baselines3 VS sample-factory

The latest release (v3.0.0) of Upkie's software brings a functional sim-to-real reinforcement learning pipeline based on Stable Baselines3, with standard sim-to-real tricks. The pipeline trains on the Gymnasium environments distributed in upkie.envs (setup: pip install upkie) and is implemented in the PPO balancer. Here is a policy running on an Upkie:

PettingZoo 1.24.0 is now live! This release includes Python 3.11 support, updated Chess and Hanabi environment versions, and many bugfixes, documentation updates and testing expansions. We are also very excited to announce 3 tutorials using Stable-Baselines3, and a full training script using CleanRL with TensorBoard and WandB.

I am wondering why there is so few algorithms in Stable Baselines 3 (SB3, https://github.com/DLR-RM/stable-baselines3/tree/master)? I was expecting some algorithms like ICM, HIRO, DIAYN, ... Why there is no model-based, skill-chaining, hierarchical-RL, ... algorithms implemented there?

Discord is more focused, and they have a page for people who wants to contribute https://github.com/DLR-RM/stable-baselines3/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

Therefore, I debugged this error to the ReplayBuffer that was imported from `SB3`. This is the problem function -

Have you ever wanted to use dm-control with stable-baselines3? Within Reinforcement learning (RL), a number of APIs are used to implement environments, with limited ability to convert between them. This makes training agents across different APIs highly difficult, and has resulted in a fractured ecosystem.

Changelog: https://github.com/DLR-RM/stable-baselines3/releases/tag/v1.8.0

Great project! One question though, is there any reason why you are not using existing RL models instead of creating your own, such as stable baselines?

I take a lot of inspiration from Sample Factory and RLlib for my own RL library's implementation. Although I thoroughly enjoy both of these libraries, they just didn't quite fit right with my use case which motivated me to start my own. Hopefully someone finds use in rlstack whether it be through direct usage or as inspiration for their own personalized library

I'm tired of having my 200m frames of Atari take 5 days to run with dopamine, so I'm looking for another framework to use. I haven't been able to find one that's fast and hackable, preferably distributed or with vectorized environments. Anybody have suggestions? seed-rl seems promising but is archived (and in TF2). sample-factory seems super fast but to the best of my knowledge doesn't work with replay buffers. I've been trying to get acme working but documentation is sparse and many of the features are broken.

Hi, try sample-factory

Sample Factory: https://github.com/alex-petrenko/sample-factory

Everything in this reply is wrong.

In AlphaZero for example, there were 44 million training games total for 700,00x0 steps of training for the full 9 hours.

Turning that human-like numbers, 44million games with on average 60 moves, at 1 second thinking time per move,

> 44000000*60/60/60/24/365 = 83,7138508371 years of training experience in 9 hours

The whole field of Reinforcement learning has agents training and playing games for many orders of magnitude more time than a human ever will. In-fact, we can scale this to over 100k of actions per second, in a single machine:

https://github.com/alex-petrenko/sample-factory

Then, there is also distributed Reinforcement Learning, where hundreds of agents can play at different machines and share experience, see AlphaZero, LeelaZero, R2D2 agent, R2D3 agent, Apex, Acer, Asynchronous PPO.

> but the data isn't useful without the context of experience

The experience is the data in Reinforcement Learning.

> and all processing power can do it overfit model without experience.

That is wrong, the agents perform what is called exploration to avoid getting stuck in simple strategies.

> Even if we put AI into an army of robots running around and experiencing things, there are still scaling limits to encoding and communicating knowledge and understanding.

True, but machines scale better because they speak the same language, or they can learn to tune their language to get their message across.

> Human organizations are a great example of the scaling limits of intelligence.

Human organization is a testament to how far we can get with something as limiting as the commonly used language. The language that we use to communicate is subject to misinterpretation due to our subjective experiences, this limitation is not shared by machines.

I borrow a lot of performance tricks from sample factory, which is awesome but hard to modify from its original APPO algorithm. rlpyt was more modular, and I borrowed more ideas from it (namedarraytuple), but still too limited.