RLDS

RLDS stands for Reinforcement Learning Datasets and it is an ecosystem of tools to store, retrieve and manipulate episodic data in the context of Sequential Decision Making including Reinforcement Learning (RL), Learning for Demonstrations, Offline RL or Imitation Learning.

This repository includes a library for manipulating RLDS compliant datasets. For other parts of the pipeline please refer to:

• EnvLogger to create synthetic datasets
• RLDS Creator to create datasets where a human interacts with an environment.
• TFDS for existing RL datasets.

QuickStart & Colabs

See how to use RLDS in this tutorial.

You can find more examples in the following colabs:

• Performance best practices
• RL examples

Dataset Format

The dataset is retrieved as a tf.data.Dataset of Episodes where each episode contains a tf.data.Dataset of steps.

• Episode: dictionary that contains a tf.data.Dataset of Steps, and metadata.

• Step: dictionary that contains:

  • observation: current observation
  • action: action taken in the current observation
  • reward: return after appyling the action to the current observation
  • is_terminal: if this is a terminal step
  • is_first: if this is the first step of an episode that contains the initial state.
  • is_last: if this is the last step of an episode, that contains the last observation. When true, action, reward and discount, and other cutom fields subsequent to the observation are considered invalid.
  • discount: discount factor at this step.
  • extra metadata

  When is_terminal = True, the observation corresponds to a final state, so reward, discount and action are meaningless. Depending on the environment, the final observation may also be meaningless.

  If an episode ends in a step where is_terminal = False, it means that this episode has been truncated. In this case, depending on the environment, the action, reward and discount might be empty as well.

How to create a dataset

Although you can read datasets with the RLDS format even if they were not created with our tools (for example, by adding them to TFDS), we recommend the use of EnvLogger and RLDS Creator as they ensure that the data is stored in a lossless fashion and compatible with RLDS.

Synthetic datasets

Envlogger provides a dm_env Environment class wrapper that records interactions between a real environment and an agent.

env = envloger.EnvironmentLogger(
      environment,
      data_directory=`/tmp/mydataset`)

Besides, two callbacks can be passed to the EnviromentLogger constructor to store per-step metadata and per-episode metadata. See the EnvLogger documentation for more details.

Note that per-session metadata can be stored but is currently ignored when loading the dataset.

Note that the Envlogger follows the dm_env convention. So considering:

• o_i: observation at step i
• a_i: action applied to o_i
• r_i: reward obtained when applying a_i in o_i
• d_i: discount for reward r_i
• m_i: metadata for step i

Data is generated and stored as:

    (o_0, _, _, _, m_0) → (o_1, a_0, r_0, d_0, m_1)  → (o_2, a_1, r_1, d_1, m_2) ⇢ ...

But loaded with RLDS as:

    (o_0,a_0, r_0, d_0, m_0) → (o_1, a_1, r_1, d_1, m_1)  → (o_2, a_2, r_2, d_2, m_2) ⇢ ...

Human datasets

If you want to collect data generated by a human interacting with an environment, check the RLDS Creator.

How to load a dataset

RL datasets can be loaded with TFDS and they are retrieved with the canonical RLDS dataset format.

See this section for instructions on how to add an RLDS dataset to TFDS.

Load with TFDS

Datasets in the TFDS catalog

These datasets can be loaded directly with:

tfds.load('dataset_name').as_dataset()['train']

This is how we load the datasets in the tutorial.

See the full documentation and the catalog in the [TFDS] site.

Datasets in your own repository

Datasets can be implemented with TFDS both inside and outside of the TFDS repository. See examples here.

How to add your dataset to TFDS

Adding a dataset to TFDS involves two steps:

• Implement a python class that provides a dataset builder with the specs of the data (e.g., what is the shape of the observations, actions, etc.) and how to read your dataset files.

• Run a download_and_prepare pipeline that converts the data to the TFDS intermediate format.

You can add your dataset directly to TFDS following the instructions at https://www.tensorflow.org/datasets.

• If your data has been generated with Envlogger or the RLDS Creator, you can just use the rlds helpers in TFDS (see here an example).
• Otherwise, make sure your generate_examples implementation provides the same structure and keys as RLDS loaders if you want your dataset to be compatible with RLDS pipelines (example).

Note that you can follow the same steps to add the data to your own repository (see more details in the TFDS documentation).

Performance best practices

As RLDS exposes RL datasets in a form of Tensorflow's tf.data, many Tensorflow's performance hints apply to RLDS as well. It is important to note, however, that RLDS datasets are very specific and not all general speed-up methods work out of the box. advices on improving performance might not result in expected outcome. To get a better understanding on how to use RLDS datasets effectively we recommend going through this colab.

Citation

If you use RLDS, please cite the RLDS paper as

@misc{ramos2021rlds,
      title={RLDS: an Ecosystem to Generate, Share and Use Datasets in Reinforcement Learning},
      author={Sabela Ramos and Sertan Girgin and Léonard Hussenot and Damien Vincent and Hanna Yakubovich and Daniel Toyama and Anita Gergely and Piotr Stanczyk and Raphael Marinier and Jeremiah Harmsen and Olivier Pietquin and Nikola Momchev},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2111.02767},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG}
}

Acknowledgements

We greatly appreciate all the support from the TF-Agents team in setting up building and testing for EnvLogger.

Disclaimer

This is not an officially supported Google product.