tmrl VS softlearning

Hi all! I'm implementing a TQC with n-step learning in Trackmania (I forked original repo from here: https://github.com/trackmania-rl/tmrl, my modified version here: https://github.com/Pheoxis/AITrackmania/tree/main). It compiles, but I am pretty sure that I implemented n-step learning incorrectly, but as a beginner I don't know what I did wrong. Here's my code before implementing n-step algorithm: https://github.com/Pheoxis/AITrackmania/blob/main/tmrl/custom/custom_algorithms.py. If anyone checked what I did wrong, I would be very grateful. I will also attach some plots from my last training and outputs from printed lines (print.txt), maybe it will help :) If you need any additional information feel free to ask.

I don't know if it fits your need : https://github.com/trackmania-rl/tmrl

Hi, if you are gonna train a deep RL algorithm on a real robot and you are a beginner, I suggest you try out tmrl. This will allow you to try out a readily available algorithm (Soft Actor-Critic) in real-time on a real video-game (TrackMania), as real-world-like proxy for all the concerns you will encounter on real robot, and to rather easily develop your own robot-learning pipeline from there for your own robot. The repo has a huge tutorial exactly for this purpose.

I see, and how did you handle the simulator and dynamics? Did you "step" the game or did you capture screenshots with constant time interval in real-time? I am asking because tmrl uses the second option in TrackMania, which makes the approach generalizable to all video games including MarioKart, but so far we met no such success training CNNs with the Soft Actor-Critic familly. The setting is a bit more difficult because it uses continuous input inckuding the gas and break (I suppose you always send gas to the maximum?) and we don't use punishments for collisions and this kind of tricks, but still, if it works that well in your setting I think it should work similarly in ours.

I am very disappointed these guys don't cite tmrl :D

If you just want to make a Gym environment, focus on rtgym. You will want to have a way of retrieving observations, say, raw images for instance. You can do this with pywin32 as done here. You will also want to grab a reward signal, which will probably be the most challenging thing to do because you will have to compute that from screenshots since you don't have access to the game internals (in fact you could because the game is opensource, but I assume you don't want to go down this path). If there is something like a score counter that's not moving somewhere, I suggest you capture that and read the numbers individually with the 1-NN algorithm (which is done in the un-supported "trackmania nation forever" versions of the tmrl encironment btw if you need help doing that). Then you will need to input controls. I see that osu is controller by the mouse and keyboard, there are several solutions for that. You can use pywin32 I think, pyautogui, keyboard, and probably others. Once you have these basic building blocks, it will be fairly straightforward to use the rtgym API in order to build you real time Gym environment.

Sometimes it is more than okay, it may be necessary. For instance in tmrl we do exactly that, because we are in a partially observable environment where we cannot say whether the next state will be terminal or not, and where what we try to actually optimize is an infinite sum of discounted rewards.

Cool project. Shameless self-advertising here but you can use vgamepad to control the game with a virtual gamepad instead of key presses, which enables analog policies. We do this in TrackMania :)

# see https://github.com/rail-berkeley/softlearning/issues/60

Found relevant code at https://github.com/rail-berkeley/softlearning + all code implementations here

Code for https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.05905 found: https://github.com/rail-berkeley/softlearning

You may read - issue with SAC (https://github.com/rail-berkeley/softlearning/issues/76 ), solution: use large OU noise or use other type of exploration like gSDE