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HMS Neuroevolution

This repository is an implementation of master's thesis project: "Application of the hierarchic memetic strategy HMS in neuroevolution"

Here we examine the HMS framework in the setting of neuroevolution. Following the findings from Uber AI Labs on neuroevolution we extend the notion of genetic algorithm to a hierarchic structure of such algorithms. Agents were evaluated on selected Atari games and simple control systems available via Gym library.

Project supports parallel and distributed execution targeted at HPC clusters.

Overview

Examined RL environments are: CartPole, LunarLander and Atari games such as Frostbite.

Project provides two types of genotype encoding:

  • Fixed length

  • Variable length - as described in Uber AI Labs paper, requires access to the noise table.

Installation

Required dependencies are available in requirements.txt.

Usage

Test CartPole experiment can be executed via:

python3 -m implementation.experiments.hms_cartpole_sea -j 8

The output placed in a separate directory provides:

  • human-readable experiment description
  • snapshots of elite models within checkpoints directory
  • scores of each evaluated deme (used for histograms)
  • output of experiment process in scores.txt
  • experiment evaluation plot

Available arguments for execution are:

usage: hms_cartpole_sea.py [-h] [-s SEED] [-j JOBS] [-e EPOCHS]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -s SEED, --seed SEED  initial seed for rng
  -j JOBS, --jobs JOBS  number or parallel workers, if -1 then it uses dask-mpi
  -e EPOCHS, --epochs EPOCHS number of epochs to run

Atari

Variable length genotype encoding, mostly used in Atari environment, requires noise table for drawing samples. It can be created via:

python3 scripts/create_noise_table.py

Executing on HPC cluster

HPC execution is provided via dask-mpi library. Exemplary script file is placed at scripts/dask-mpi-batch.sh. It's adjusted to be used on PLGrid Prometheus supercomputer and can be run via:

sbatch scripts/dask-mpi-batch.sh

Implementing your own experiment & environment

Custom experiments and environments can be easily created by implementing proper abstract class.

By implementing implementation/experiments/base_experiment.py one can express what an individual is and how to evaluate it.

Experiment script should follow e.g. implementation/experiments/hms_cartpole_sea.py.

Environment base class (implementation/environment/base_env.py) imposes Gym usage and generally covers most of its environments.

Visualization

Project provides a few notebooks for episode recording for elites (fun to watch!) and plotting (in /notebooks directory - detailed instructions inside a notebook).

Please see live example evaluation here: https://youtu.be/t3P0w0I7Xw8