Welcome to Tianshou!¶
Tianshou (天授) is a reinforcement learning platform based on pure PyTorch. Unlike existing reinforcement learning libraries, which are mainly based on TensorFlow, have many nested classes, unfriendly API, or slow-speed, Tianshou provides a fast-speed framework and pythonic API for building the deep reinforcement learning agent. The supported interface algorithms include:
ImitationPolicy
Imitation Learning
Here is Tianshou’s other features:
Elegant framework, using only ~2000 lines of code
Support parallel environment sampling for all algorithms: Parallel Sampling
Support recurrent state representation in actor network and critic network (RNN-style training for POMDP): RNN-style Training
Support any type of environment state (e.g. a dict, a self-defined class, …): User-defined Environment and Different State Representation
Support customized training process: Customize Training Process
Support n-step returns estimation
compute_nstep_return()
for all Q-learning based algorithmsSupport multi-agent RL: Multi-Agent RL
中文文档位于 https://tianshou.readthedocs.io/zh/latest/
Installation¶
Tianshou is currently hosted on PyPI. You can simply install Tianshou with the following command (with Python >= 3.6):
$ pip install tianshou
You can also install with the newest version through GitHub:
# latest release
$ pip install git+https://github.com/thu-ml/tianshou.git@master
# develop version
$ pip install git+https://github.com/thu-ml/tianshou.git@dev
If you use Anaconda or Miniconda, you can install Tianshou through the following command lines:
# create a new virtualenv and install pip, change the env name if you like
$ conda create -n myenv pip
# activate the environment
$ conda activate myenv
# install tianshou
$ pip install tianshou
After installation, open your python console and type
import tianshou as ts
print(ts.__version__)
If no error occurs, you have successfully installed Tianshou.
Tianshou is still under development, you can also check out the documents in stable version through tianshou.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ and the develop version through tianshou.readthedocs.io/en/dev/.
Deep Q Network¶
Deep reinforcement learning has achieved significant successes in various applications. Deep Q Network (DQN) [MKS+15] is the pioneer one. In this tutorial, we will show how to train a DQN agent on CartPole with Tianshou step by step. The full script is at test/discrete/test_dqn.py.
Contrary to existing Deep RL libraries such as RLlib, which could only accept a config specification of hyperparameters, network, and others, Tianshou provides an easy way of construction through the code-level.
Make an Environment¶
First of all, you have to make an environment for your agent to interact with. For environment interfaces, we follow the convention of OpenAI Gym. In your Python code, simply import Tianshou and make the environment:
import gym
import tianshou as ts
env = gym.make('CartPole-v0')
CartPole-v0 is a simple environment with a discrete action space, for which DQN applies. You have to identify whether the action space is continuous or discrete and apply eligible algorithms. DDPG [LHP+16], for example, could only be applied to continuous action spaces, while almost all other policy gradient methods could be applied to both, depending on the probability distribution on the action.
Setup Multi-environment Wrapper¶
It is available if you want the original gym.Env
:
train_envs = gym.make('CartPole-v0')
test_envs = gym.make('CartPole-v0')
Tianshou supports parallel sampling for all algorithms. It provides three types of vectorized environment wrapper: VectorEnv
, SubprocVectorEnv
, and RayVectorEnv
. It can be used as follows:
train_envs = ts.env.VectorEnv([lambda: gym.make('CartPole-v0') for _ in range(8)])
test_envs = ts.env.VectorEnv([lambda: gym.make('CartPole-v0') for _ in range(100)])
Here, we set up 8 environments in train_envs
and 100 environments in test_envs
.
For the demonstration, here we use the second block of codes.
Build the Network¶
Tianshou supports any user-defined PyTorch networks and optimizers but with the limitation of input and output API. Here is an example code:
import torch, numpy as np
from torch import nn
class Net(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, state_shape, action_shape):
super().__init__()
self.model = nn.Sequential(*[
nn.Linear(np.prod(state_shape), 128), nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Linear(128, 128), nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Linear(128, 128), nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Linear(128, np.prod(action_shape))
])
def forward(self, obs, state=None, info={}):
if not isinstance(obs, torch.Tensor):
obs = torch.tensor(obs, dtype=torch.float)
batch = obs.shape[0]
logits = self.model(obs.view(batch, -1))
return logits, state
state_shape = env.observation_space.shape or env.observation_space.n
action_shape = env.action_space.shape or env.action_space.n
net = Net(state_shape, action_shape)
optim = torch.optim.Adam(net.parameters(), lr=1e-3)
You can also have a try with those pre-defined networks in common
, discrete
, and continuous
. The rules of self-defined networks are:
Input: observation
obs
(may be anumpy.ndarray
,torch.Tensor
, dict, or self-defined class), hidden statestate
(for RNN usage), and other informationinfo
provided by the environment.Output: some
logits
, the next hidden statestate
, and intermediate result during the policy forwarding procedurepolicy
. The logits could be a tuple instead of atorch.Tensor
. It depends on how the policy process the network output. For example, in PPO [SWD+17], the return of the network might be(mu, sigma), state
for Gaussian policy. Thepolicy
can be a Batch of torch.Tensor or other things, which will be stored in the replay buffer, and can be accessed in the policy update process (e.g. inpolicy.learn()
, thebatch.policy
is what you need).
Setup Policy¶
We use the defined net
and optim
, with extra policy hyper-parameters, to define a policy. Here we define a DQN policy with using a target network:
policy = ts.policy.DQNPolicy(net, optim, discount_factor=0.9, estimation_step=3, target_update_freq=320)
Setup Collector¶
The collector is a key concept in Tianshou. It allows the policy to interact with different types of environments conveniently. In each step, the collector will let the policy perform (at least) a specified number of steps or episodes and store the data in a replay buffer.
train_collector = ts.data.Collector(policy, train_envs, ts.data.ReplayBuffer(size=20000))
test_collector = ts.data.Collector(policy, test_envs)
Train Policy with a Trainer¶
Tianshou provides onpolicy_trainer
and offpolicy_trainer
. The trainer will automatically stop training when the policy reach the stop condition stop_fn
on test collector. Since DQN is an off-policy algorithm, we use the offpolicy_trainer
as follows:
result = ts.trainer.offpolicy_trainer(
policy, train_collector, test_collector,
max_epoch=10, step_per_epoch=1000, collect_per_step=10,
episode_per_test=100, batch_size=64,
train_fn=lambda e: policy.set_eps(0.1),
test_fn=lambda e: policy.set_eps(0.05),
stop_fn=lambda x: x >= env.spec.reward_threshold,
writer=None)
print(f'Finished training! Use {result["duration"]}')
The meaning of each parameter is as follows (full description can be found at offpolicy_trainer()
):
max_epoch
: The maximum of epochs for training. The training process might be finished before reaching themax_epoch
;step_per_epoch
: The number of step for updating policy network in one epoch;collect_per_step
: The number of frames the collector would collect before the network update. For example, the code above means “collect 10 frames and do one policy network update”;episode_per_test
: The number of episodes for one policy evaluation.batch_size
: The batch size of sample data, which is going to feed in the policy network.train_fn
: A function receives the current number of epoch index and performs some operations at the beginning of training in this epoch. For example, the code above means “reset the epsilon to 0.1 in DQN before training”.test_fn
: A function receives the current number of epoch index and performs some operations at the beginning of testing in this epoch. For example, the code above means “reset the epsilon to 0.05 in DQN before testing”.stop_fn
: A function receives the average undiscounted returns of the testing result, return a boolean which indicates whether reaching the goal.writer
: See below.
The trainer supports TensorBoard for logging. It can be used as:
from torch.utils.tensorboard import SummaryWriter
writer = SummaryWriter('log/dqn')
Pass the writer into the trainer, and the training result will be recorded into the TensorBoard.
The returned result is a dictionary as follows:
{
'train_step': 9246,
'train_episode': 504.0,
'train_time/collector': '0.65s',
'train_time/model': '1.97s',
'train_speed': '3518.79 step/s',
'test_step': 49112,
'test_episode': 400.0,
'test_time': '1.38s',
'test_speed': '35600.52 step/s',
'best_reward': 199.03,
'duration': '4.01s'
}
It shows that within approximately 4 seconds, we finished training a DQN agent on CartPole. The mean returns over 100 consecutive episodes is 199.03.
Save/Load Policy¶
Since the policy inherits the torch.nn.Module
class, saving and loading the policy are exactly the same as a torch module:
torch.save(policy.state_dict(), 'dqn.pth')
policy.load_state_dict(torch.load('dqn.pth'))
Watch the Agent’s Performance¶
Collector
supports rendering. Here is the example of watching the agent’s performance in 35 FPS:
collector = ts.data.Collector(policy, env)
collector.collect(n_episode=1, render=1 / 35)
collector.close()
Train a Policy with Customized Codes¶
“I don’t want to use your provided trainer. I want to customize it!”
Tianshou supports user-defined training code. Here is the code snippet:
# pre-collect 5000 frames with random action before training
policy.set_eps(1)
train_collector.collect(n_step=5000)
policy.set_eps(0.1)
for i in range(int(1e6)): # total step
collect_result = train_collector.collect(n_step=10)
# once if the collected episodes' mean returns reach the threshold,
# or every 1000 steps, we test it on test_collector
if collect_result['rew'] >= env.spec.reward_threshold or i % 1000 == 0:
policy.set_eps(0.05)
result = test_collector.collect(n_episode=100)
if result['rew'] >= env.spec.reward_threshold:
print(f'Finished training! Test mean returns: {result["rew"]}')
break
else:
# back to training eps
policy.set_eps(0.1)
# train policy with a sampled batch data
losses = policy.learn(train_collector.sample(batch_size=64))
For further usage, you can refer to the Cheat Sheet.
References
- MKS+15
Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Andrei A. Rusu, Joel Veness, Marc G. Bellemare, Alex Graves, Martin A. Riedmiller, Andreas Fidjeland, Georg Ostrovski, Stig Petersen, Charles Beattie, Amir Sadik, Ioannis Antonoglou, Helen King, Dharshan Kumaran, Daan Wierstra, Shane Legg, and Demis Hassabis. Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning. Nature, 518(7540):529–533, 2015. URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14236, doi:10.1038/nature14236.
- LHP+16
Timothy P. Lillicrap, Jonathan J. Hunt, Alexander Pritzel, Nicolas Heess, Tom Erez, Yuval Tassa, David Silver, and Daan Wierstra. Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning. In 4th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2016, San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 2-4, 2016, Conference Track Proceedings. 2016. URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.02971.
- SWD+17
John Schulman, Filip Wolski, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alec Radford, and Oleg Klimov. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. CoRR, 2017. URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.06347, arXiv:1707.06347.
Basic concepts in Tianshou¶
Tianshou splits a Reinforcement Learning agent training procedure into these parts: trainer, collector, policy, and data buffer. The general control flow can be described as:

Here is a more detailed description, where Env
is the environment and Model
is the neural network:

Batch¶
Tianshou provides Batch
as the internal data structure to pass any kind of data to other methods, for example, a collector gives a Batch
to policy for learning. Let’s take a look at this script:
>>> import torch, numpy as np
>>> from tianshou.data import Batch
>>> data = Batch(a=4, b=[5, 5], c='2312312', d=('a', -2, -3))
>>> # the list will automatically be converted to numpy array
>>> data.b
array([5, 5])
>>> data.b = np.array([3, 4, 5])
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: 4,
b: array([3, 4, 5]),
c: '2312312',
d: array(['a', '-2', '-3'], dtype=object),
)
>>> data = Batch(obs={'index': np.zeros((2, 3))}, act=torch.zeros((2, 2)))
>>> data[:, 1] += 6
>>> print(data[-1])
Batch(
obs: Batch(
index: array([0., 6., 0.]),
),
act: tensor([0., 6.]),
)
In short, you can define a Batch
with any key-value pair, and perform some common operations over it.
Understand Batch is a dedicated tutorial for Batch
. We strongly recommend every user to read it so as to correctly understand and use Batch
.
Buffer¶
ReplayBuffer
stores data generated from
interaction between the policy and environment. The current implementation
of Tianshou typically use 7 reserved keys in Batch
:
obs
the observation of step \(t\) ;act
the action of step \(t\) ;rew
the reward of step \(t\) ;done
the done flag of step \(t\) ;obs_next
the observation of step \(t+1\) ;info
the info of step \(t\) (ingym.Env
, theenv.step()
function returns 4 arguments, and the last one isinfo
);policy
the data computed by policy in step \(t\);
The following code snippet illustrates its usage:
>>> import numpy as np
>>> from tianshou.data import ReplayBuffer
>>> buf = ReplayBuffer(size=20)
>>> for i in range(3):
... buf.add(obs=i, act=i, rew=i, done=i, obs_next=i + 1, info={})
>>> buf.obs
# since we set size = 20, len(buf.obs) == 20.
array([0., 1., 2., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.,
0., 0., 0., 0.])
>>> # but there are only three valid items, so len(buf) == 3.
>>> len(buf)
3
>>> buf2 = ReplayBuffer(size=10)
>>> for i in range(15):
... buf2.add(obs=i, act=i, rew=i, done=i, obs_next=i + 1, info={})
>>> len(buf2)
10
>>> buf2.obs
# since its size = 10, it only stores the last 10 steps' result.
array([10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9.])
>>> # move buf2's result into buf (meanwhile keep it chronologically)
>>> buf.update(buf2)
array([ 0., 1., 2., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14.,
0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.])
>>> # get a random sample from buffer
>>> # the batch_data is equal to buf[incide].
>>> batch_data, indice = buf.sample(batch_size=4)
>>> batch_data.obs == buf[indice].obs
array([ True, True, True, True])
ReplayBuffer
also supports frame_stack sampling
(typically for RNN usage, see issue#19), ignoring storing the next
observation (save memory in atari tasks), and multi-modal observation (see
issue#38):
>>> buf = ReplayBuffer(size=9, stack_num=4, ignore_obs_next=True)
>>> for i in range(16):
... done = i % 5 == 0
... buf.add(obs={'id': i}, act=i, rew=i, done=done,
... obs_next={'id': i + 1})
>>> print(buf) # you can see obs_next is not saved in buf
ReplayBuffer(
act: array([ 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 15., 7., 8.]),
done: array([0., 1., 0., 0., 0., 0., 1., 0., 0.]),
info: Batch(),
obs: Batch(
id: array([ 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 15., 7., 8.]),
),
policy: Batch(),
rew: array([ 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 15., 7., 8.]),
)
>>> index = np.arange(len(buf))
>>> print(buf.get(index, 'obs').id)
[[ 7. 7. 8. 9.]
[ 7. 8. 9. 10.]
[11. 11. 11. 11.]
[11. 11. 11. 12.]
[11. 11. 12. 13.]
[11. 12. 13. 14.]
[12. 13. 14. 15.]
[ 7. 7. 7. 7.]
[ 7. 7. 7. 8.]]
>>> # here is another way to get the stacked data
>>> # (stack only for obs and obs_next)
>>> abs(buf.get(index, 'obs')['id'] - buf[index].obs.id).sum().sum()
0.0
>>> # we can get obs_next through __getitem__, even if it doesn't exist
>>> print(buf[:].obs_next.id)
[[ 7. 8. 9. 10.]
[ 7. 8. 9. 10.]
[11. 11. 11. 12.]
[11. 11. 12. 13.]
[11. 12. 13. 14.]
[12. 13. 14. 15.]
[12. 13. 14. 15.]
[ 7. 7. 7. 8.]
[ 7. 7. 8. 9.]]
- param int size
the size of replay buffer.
- param int stack_num
the frame-stack sampling argument, should be greater than 1, defaults to 0 (no stacking).
- param bool ignore_obs_next
whether to store obs_next, defaults to
False
.- param bool sample_avail
the parameter indicating sampling only available index when using frame-stack sampling method, defaults to
False
. This feature is not supported in Prioritized Replay Buffer currently.
-
tianshou.data.ReplayBuffer.
__setattr__
(self, name, value, /) Implement setattr(self, name, value).
Tianshou provides other type of data buffer such as ListReplayBuffer
(based on list), PrioritizedReplayBuffer
(based on Segment Tree and numpy.ndarray
). Check out ReplayBuffer
for more detail.
Policy¶
Tianshou aims to modularizing RL algorithms. It comes into several classes of policies in Tianshou. All of the policy classes must inherit BasePolicy
.
A policy class typically has four parts:
__init__()
: initialize the policy, including coping the target network and so on;forward()
: compute action with given observation;process_fn()
: pre-process data from the replay buffer (this function can interact with replay buffer);learn()
: update policy with a given batch of data.
Take 2-step return DQN as an example. The 2-step return DQN compute each frame’s return as:
where \(\gamma\) is the discount factor, \(\gamma \in [0, 1]\). Here is the pseudocode showing the training process without Tianshou framework:
# pseudocode, cannot work
s = env.reset()
buffer = Buffer(size=10000)
agent = DQN()
for i in range(int(1e6)):
a = agent.compute_action(s)
s_, r, d, _ = env.step(a)
buffer.store(s, a, s_, r, d)
s = s_
if i % 1000 == 0:
b_s, b_a, b_s_, b_r, b_d = buffer.get(size=64)
# compute 2-step returns. How?
b_ret = compute_2_step_return(buffer, b_r, b_d, ...)
# update DQN policy
agent.update(b_s, b_a, b_s_, b_r, b_d, b_ret)
Thus, we need a time-related interface for calculating the 2-step return. process_fn()
finishes this work by providing the replay buffer, the sample index, and the sample batch data. Since we store all the data in the order of time, you can simply compute the 2-step return as:
class DQN_2step(BasePolicy):
"""some code"""
def process_fn(self, batch, buffer, indice):
buffer_len = len(buffer)
batch_2 = buffer[(indice + 2) % buffer_len]
# this will return a batch data where batch_2.obs is s_t+2
# we can also get s_t+2 through:
# batch_2_obs = buffer.obs[(indice + 2) % buffer_len]
# in short, buffer.obs[i] is equal to buffer[i].obs, but the former is more effecient.
Q = self(batch_2, eps=0) # shape: [batchsize, action_shape]
maxQ = Q.max(dim=-1)
batch.returns = batch.rew \
+ self._gamma * buffer.rew[(indice + 1) % buffer_len] \
+ self._gamma ** 2 * maxQ
return batch
This code does not consider the done flag, so it may not work very well. It shows two ways to get \(s_{t + 2}\) from the replay buffer easily in process_fn()
.
For other method, you can check out tianshou.policy. We give the usage of policy class a high-level explanation in A High-level Explanation.
Collector¶
The Collector
enables the policy to interact with different types of environments conveniently.
In short, Collector
has two main methods:
collect()
: let the policy perform (at least) a specified number of stepn_step
or episoden_episode
and store the data in the replay buffer;sample()
: sample a data batch from replay buffer; it will callprocess_fn()
before returning the final batch data.
Why do we mention at least here? For a single environment, the collector will finish exactly n_step
or n_episode
. However, for multiple environments, we could not directly store the collected data into the replay buffer, since it breaks the principle of storing data chronologically.
The solution is to add some cache buffers inside the collector. Once collecting a full episode of trajectory, it will move the stored data from the cache buffer to the main buffer. To satisfy this condition, the collector will interact with environments that may exceed the given step number or episode number.
The general explanation is listed in A High-level Explanation. Other usages of collector are listed in Collector
documentation.
Trainer¶
Once you have a collector and a policy, you can start writing the training method for your RL agent. Trainer, to be honest, is a simple wrapper. It helps you save energy for writing the training loop. You can also construct your own trainer: Train a Policy with Customized Codes.
Tianshou has two types of trainer: onpolicy_trainer()
and offpolicy_trainer()
, corresponding to on-policy algorithms (such as Policy Gradient) and off-policy algorithms (such as DQN). Please check out tianshou.trainer for the usage.
There will be more types of trainers, for instance, multi-agent trainer.
A High-level Explanation¶
We give a high-level explanation through the pseudocode used in section Policy:
# pseudocode, cannot work # methods in tianshou
s = env.reset()
buffer = Buffer(size=10000) # buffer = tianshou.data.ReplayBuffer(size=10000)
agent = DQN() # policy.__init__(...)
for i in range(int(1e6)): # done in trainer
a = agent.compute_action(s) # policy(batch, ...)
s_, r, d, _ = env.step(a) # collector.collect(...)
buffer.store(s, a, s_, r, d) # collector.collect(...)
s = s_ # collector.collect(...)
if i % 1000 == 0: # done in trainer
b_s, b_a, b_s_, b_r, b_d = buffer.get(size=64) # collector.sample(batch_size)
# compute 2-step returns. How?
b_ret = compute_2_step_return(buffer, b_r, b_d, ...) # policy.process_fn(batch, buffer, indice)
# update DQN policy
agent.update(b_s, b_a, b_s_, b_r, b_d, b_ret) # policy.learn(batch, ...)
Conclusion¶
So far, we go through the overall framework of Tianshou. Really simple, isn’t it?
Understand Batch¶
Batch
is the internal data structure extensively used in Tianshou. It is designed to store and manipulate hierarchical named tensors. This tutorial aims to help users correctly understand the concept and the behavior of Batch
so that users can make the best of Tianshou.
The tutorial has three parts. We first explain the concept of hierarchical named tensors, and introduce basic usage of Batch
, followed by advanced topics of Batch
.
Hierarchical Named Tensors¶
“Hierarchical named tensors” refers to a set of tensors where their names form a hierarchy. Suppose there are four tensors [t1, t2, t3, t4]
with names [name1, name2, name3, name4]
, where name1
and name2
belong to the same namespace name0
, then the full name of tensor t1
is name0.name1
. That is, the hierarchy lies in the names of tensors.
We can describe the structure of hierarchical named tensors using a tree in the right. There is always a “virtual root” node to represent the whole object; internal nodes are keys (names), and leaf nodes are values (scalars or tensors).
Hierarchical named tensors are needed because we have to deal with the heterogeneity of reinforcement learning problems. The abstraction of RL is very simple, just:
state, reward, done = env.step(action)
reward
and done
are simple, they are mostly scalar values. However, the state
and action
vary with environments. For example, state
can be simply a vector, a tensor, or a camera input combined with sensory input. In the last case, it is natural to store them as hierarchical named tensors. This hierarchy can go beyond state
and action
: we can store state
, action
, reward
, and done
together as hierarchical named tensors.
Note that, storing hierarchical named tensors is as easy as creating nested dictionary objects:
{
'done': done,
'reward': reward,
'state': {
'camera': camera,
'sensory': sensory
}
'action': {
'direct': direct,
'point_3d': point_3d,
'force': force,
}
}
The real problem is how to manipulate them, such as adding new transition tuples into replay buffer and dealing with their heterogeneity. Batch
is designed to easily create, store, and manipulate these hierarchical named tensors.
Basic Usages¶
Here we cover some basic usages of Batch
, describing what Batch
contains, how to construct Batch
objects and how to manipulate them.
What Does Batch Contain¶
The content of Batch
objects can be defined by the following rules.
A
Batch
object can be an emptyBatch()
, or have at least one key-value pairs.Batch()
can be used to reserve keys, too. See Key Reservations for this advanced usage.The keys are always strings (they are names of corresponding values).
The values can be scalars, tensors, or Batch objects. The recurse definition makes it possible to form a hierarchy of batches.
Tensors are the most important values. In short, tensors are n-dimensional arrays of the same data type. We support two types of tensors: PyTorch tensor type
torch.Tensor
and NumPy tensor typenp.ndarray
.Scalars are also valid values. A scalar is a single boolean, number, or object. They can be python scalar (
False
,1
,2.3
,None
,'hello'
) or NumPy scalar (np.bool_(True)
,np.int32(1)
,np.float64(2.3)
). They just shouldn’t be mixed up with Batch/dict/tensors.
Note
Batch
cannot store dict
objects, because internally Batch
uses dict
to store data. During construction, dict
objects will be automatically converted to Batch
objects.
The data types of tensors are bool and numbers (any size of int and float as long as they are supported by NumPy or PyTorch). Besides, NumPy supports ndarray of objects and we take advantage of this feature to store non-number objects in Batch
. If one wants to store data that are neither boolean nor numbers (such as strings and sets), they can store the data in np.ndarray
with the np.object
data type. This way, Batch
can store any type of python objects.
Construction of Batch¶
There are two ways to construct a Batch
object: from a dict
, or using kwargs
. Below are some code snippets.
Construct Batch from dict
>>> # directly passing a dict object (possibly nested) is ok
>>> data = Batch({'a': 4, 'b': [5, 5], 'c': '2312312'})
>>> # the list will automatically be converted to numpy array
>>> data.b
array([5, 5])
>>> data.b = np.array([3, 4, 5])
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: 4,
b: array([3, 4, 5]),
c: '2312312',
)
>>> # a list of dict objects (possibly nested) will be automatically stacked
>>> data = Batch([{'a': 0.0, 'b': "hello"}, {'a': 1.0, 'b': "world"}])
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: array([0., 1.]),
b: array(['hello', 'world'], dtype=object),
)
Construct Batch from kwargs
>>> # construct a Batch with keyword arguments
>>> data = Batch(a=[4, 4], b=[5, 5], c=[None, None])
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: array([4, 4]),
b: array([5, 5]),
c: array([None, None], dtype=object),
)
>>> # combining keyword arguments and batch_dict works fine
>>> data = Batch({'a':[4, 4], 'b':[5, 5]}, c=[None, None]) # the first argument is a dict, and 'c' is a keyword argument
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: array([4, 4]),
b: array([5, 5]),
c: array([None, None], dtype=object),
)
>>> arr = np.zeros((3, 4))
>>> # By default, Batch only keeps the reference to the data, but it also supports data copying
>>> data = Batch(arr=arr, copy=True) # data.arr now is a copy of 'arr'
Data Manipulation With Batch¶
Users can access the internal data by b.key
or b[key]
, where b.key
finds the sub-tree with key
as the root node. If the result is a sub-tree with non-empty keys, the key-reference can be chained, i.e. b.key.key1.key2.key3
. When it reaches a leaf node, users get the data (scalars/tensors) stored in that Batch
object.
Access data stored in Batch
>>> data = Batch(a=4, b=[5, 5])
>>> print(data.b)
[5 5]
>>> # obj.key is equivalent to obj["key"]
>>> print(data["a"])
4
>>> # iterating over data items like a dict is supported
>>> for key, value in data.items():
>>> print(f"{key}: {value}")
a: 4
b: [5, 5]
>>> # obj.keys() and obj.values() work just like dict.keys() and dict.values()
>>> for key in data.keys():
>>> print(f"{key}")
a
b
>>> # obj.update() behaves like dict.update()
>>> # this is the same as data.c = 1; data.c = 2; data.e = 3;
>>> data.update(c=1, d=2, e=3)
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: 4,
b: array([5, 5]),
c: 1,
d: 2,
e: 3,
)
Note
If data
is a dict
object, for x in data
iterates over keys in the dict. However, it has a different meaning for Batch
objects: for x in data
iterates over data[0], data[1], ..., data[-1]
. An example is given below.
Batch
also partially reproduces the NumPy ndarray APIs. It supports advanced slicing, such as batch[:, i]
so long as the slice is valid. Broadcast mechanism of NumPy works for Batch
, too.
Length, shape, indexing, and slicing of Batch
>>> # initialize Batch with tensors
>>> data = Batch(a=np.array([[0.0, 2.0], [1.0, 3.0]]), b=[[5, -5], [1, -2]])
>>> # if values have the same length/shape, that length/shape is used for this Batch
>>> # else, check the advanced topic for details
>>> print(len(data))
2
>>> print(data.shape)
[2, 2]
>>> # access the first item of all the stored tensors, while keeping the structure of Batch
>>> print(data[0])
Batch(
a: array([0., 2.])
b: array([ 5, -5]),
)
>>> # iterates over ``data[0], data[1], ..., data[-1]``
>>> for sample in data:
>>> print(sample.a)
[0. 2.]
[1. 3.]
>>> # Advanced slicing works just fine
>>> # Arithmetic operations are passed to each value in the Batch, with broadcast enabled
>>> data[:, 1] += 1
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: array([[0., 3.],
[1., 4.]]),
b: array([[ 5, -4]]),
)
>>> # amazingly, you can directly apply np.mean to a Batch object
>>> print(np.mean(data))
Batch(
a: 1.5,
b: -0.25,
)
>>> # directly converted to a list is also available
>>> list(data)
[Batch(
a: array([0., 3.]),
b: array([ 5, -4]),
),
Batch(
a: array([1., 4.]),
b: array([ 1, -1]),
)]
Stacking and concatenating multiple Batch
instances, or split an instance into multiple batches, they are all easy and intuitive in Tianshou. For now, we stick to the aggregation (stack/concatenate) of homogeneous (same structure) batches. Stack/Concatenation of heterogeneous batches are discussed in Aggregation of Heterogeneous Batches.
Stack / Concatenate / Split of Batches
>>> data_1 = Batch(a=np.array([0.0, 2.0]), b=5)
>>> data_2 = Batch(a=np.array([1.0, 3.0]), b=-5)
>>> data = Batch.stack((data_1, data_2))
>>> print(data)
Batch(
b: array([ 5, -5]),
a: array([[0., 2.],
[1., 3.]]),
)
>>> # split supports random shuffling
>>> data_split = list(data.split(1, shuffle=False))
>>> print(list(data.split(1, shuffle=False)))
[Batch(
b: array([5]),
a: array([[0., 2.]]),
), Batch(
b: array([-5]),
a: array([[1., 3.]]),
)]
>>> data_cat = Batch.cat(data_split)
>>> print(data_cat)
Batch(
b: array([ 5, -5]),
a: array([[0., 2.],
[1., 3.]]),
)
Advanced Topics¶
From here on, this tutorial focuses on advanced topics of Batch
, including key reservation, length/shape, and aggregation of heterogeneous batches.
Key Reservations¶
In many cases, we know in the first place what keys we have, but we do not know the shape of values until we run the environment. To deal with this, Tianshou supports key reservations: reserve a key and use a placeholder value.
The usage is easy: just use Batch()
to be the value of reserved keys.
a = Batch(b=Batch()) # 'b' is a reserved key
# this is called hierarchical key reservation
a = Batch(b=Batch(c=Batch()), d=Batch()) # 'c' and 'd' are reserved key
# the structure of this last Batch is shown in the right figure
a = Batch(key1=tensor1, key2=tensor2, key3=Batch(key4=Batch(), key5=Batch()))
Still, we can use a tree (in the right) to show the structure of Batch
objects with reserved keys, where reserved keys are special internal nodes that do not have attached leaf nodes.
Note
Reserved keys mean that in the future there will eventually be values attached to them. The values can be scalars, tensors, or even Batch objects. Understanding this is critical to understand the behavior of Batch
when dealing with heterogeneous Batches.
The introduction of reserved keys gives rise to the need to check if a key is reserved. Tianshou provides Batch.is_empty
to achieve this.
Examples of Batch.is_empty
>>> Batch().is_empty()
True
>>> Batch(a=Batch(), b=Batch(c=Batch())).is_empty()
False
>>> Batch(a=Batch(), b=Batch(c=Batch())).is_empty(recurse=True)
True
>>> Batch(d=1).is_empty()
False
>>> Batch(a=np.float64(1.0)).is_empty()
False
The Batch.is_empty
function has an option to decide whether to identify direct emptiness (just a Batch()
) or to identify recurse emptiness (a Batch
object without any scalar/tensor leaf nodes).
Note
Do not get confused with Batch.is_empty
and Batch.empty
. Batch.empty
and its in-place variant Batch.empty_
are used to set some values to zeros or None. Check the API documentation for further details.
Length and Shape¶
The most common usage of Batch
is to store a Batch of data. The term “Batch” comes from the deep learning community to denote a mini-batch of sampled data from the whole dataset. In this regard, “Batch” typically means a collection of tensors whose first dimensions are the same. Then the length of a Batch
object is simply the batch-size.
If all the leaf nodes in a Batch
object are tensors, but they have different lengths, they can be readily stored in Batch
. However, for Batch
of this kind, the len(obj)
seems a bit ambiguous. Currently, Tianshou returns the length of the shortest tensor, but we strongly recommend that users do not use the len(obj)
operator on Batch
objects with tensors of different lengths.
Examples of len and obj.shape for Batch objects
>>> data = Batch(a=[5., 4.], b=np.zeros((2, 3, 4)))
>>> data.shape
[2]
>>> len(data)
2
>>> data[0].shape
[]
>>> len(data[0])
TypeError: Object of type 'Batch' has no len()
Note
Following the convention of scientific computation, scalars have no length. If there is any scalar leaf node in a Batch
object, an exception will occur when users call len(obj)
.
Besides, values of reserved keys are undetermined, so they have no length, neither. Or, to be specific, values of reserved keys have lengths of any. When there is a mix of tensors and reserved keys, the latter will be ignored in len(obj)
and the minimum length of tensors is returned. When there is not any tensor in the Batch
object, Tianshou raises an exception, too.
The obj.shape
attribute of Batch
behaves somewhat similar to len(obj)
:
If all the leaf nodes in a
Batch
object are tensors with the same shape, that shape is returned.If all the leaf nodes in a
Batch
object are tensors but they have different shapes, the minimum length of each dimension is returned.If there is any scalar value in a
Batch
object,obj.shape
returns[]
.The shape of reserved keys is undetermined, too. We treat their shape as
[]
.
Aggregation of Heterogeneous Batches¶
In this section, we talk about aggregation operators (stack/concatenate) on heterogeneous Batch
objects.
The following picture will give you an intuitive understanding of this behavior. It shows two examples of aggregation operators with heterogeneous Batch
. The shapes of tensors are annotated in the leaf nodes.

We only consider the heterogeneity in the structure of Batch
objects. The aggregation operators are eventually done by NumPy/PyTorch operators (np.stack
, np.concatenate
, torch.stack
, torch.cat
). Heterogeneity in values can fail these operators (such as stacking np.ndarray
with torch.Tensor
, or stacking tensors with different shapes) and an exception will be raised.
The behavior is natural: for keys that are not shared across all batches, batches that do not have these keys will be padded by zeros (or None
if the data type is np.object
). It can be written in the following scripts:
>>> # examples of stack: a is missing key `b`, and b is missing key `a`
>>> a = Batch(a=np.zeros([4, 4]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([4, 5])))
>>> b = Batch(b=np.zeros([4, 6]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([4, 5])))
>>> c = Batch.stack([a, b])
>>> c.a.shape
(2, 4, 4)
>>> c.b.shape
(2, 4, 6)
>>> c.common.c.shape
(2, 4, 5)
>>> # None or 0 is padded with appropriate shape
>>> data_1 = Batch(a=np.array([0.0, 2.0]))
>>> data_2 = Batch(a=np.array([1.0, 3.0]), b='done')
>>> data = Batch.stack((data_1, data_2))
>>> print(data)
Batch(
a: array([[0., 2.],
[1., 3.]]),
b: array([None, 'done'], dtype=object),
)
>>> # examples of cat: a is missing key `b`, and b is missing key `a`
>>> a = Batch(a=np.zeros([3, 4]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([3, 5])))
>>> b = Batch(b=np.zeros([4, 3]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([4, 5])))
>>> c = Batch.cat([a, b])
>>> c.a.shape
(7, 4)
>>> c.b.shape
(7, 3)
>>> c.common.c.shape
(7, 5)
However, there are some cases when batches are too heterogeneous that they cannot be aggregated:
>>> a = Batch(a=np.zeros([4, 4]))
>>> b = Batch(a=Batch(b=Batch()))
>>> # this will raise an exception
>>> c = Batch.stack([a, b])
Then how to determine if batches can be aggregated? Let’s rethink the purpose of reserved keys. What is the advantage of a1=Batch(b=Batch())
over a2=Batch()
? The only difference is that a1.b
returns Batch()
but a2.b
raises an exception. That’s to say, we reserve keys for attribute reference.
We say a key chain k=[key1, key2, ..., keyn]
applies to b
if the expression b.key1.key2.{...}.keyn
is valid, and the result is b[k]
.
For a set of Batch
objects denoted as \(S\), they can be aggregated if there exists a Batch
object b
satisfying the following rules:
Key chain applicability: For any object
bi
in \(S\), and any key chaink
, ifbi[k]
is valid, thenb[k]
is valid.Type consistency: If
bi[k]
is notBatch()
(the last key in the key chain is not a reserved key), then the type ofb[k]
should be the same asbi[k]
(both should be scalar/tensor/non-empty Batch values).
The Batch
object b
satisfying these rules with the minimum number of keys determines the structure of aggregating \(S\). The values are relatively easy to define: for any key chain k
that applies to b
, b[k]
is the stack/concatenation of [bi[k] for bi in S]
(if k
does not apply to bi
, the appropriate size of zeros or None
are filled automatically). If bi[k]
are all Batch()
, then the aggregation result is also an empty Batch()
.
Miscellaneous Notes¶
Batch
is serializable and therefore Pickle compatible.Batch
objects can be saved to disk and later restored by the pythonpickle
module. This pickle compatibility is especially important for distributed sampling from environments.
Batch.to_torch and Batch.to_numpy
>>> data = Batch(a=np.zeros((3, 4)))
>>> data.to_torch(dtype=torch.float32, device='cpu')
>>> print(data.a)
tensor([[0., 0., 0., 0.],
[0., 0., 0., 0.],
[0., 0., 0., 0.]])
>>> # data.to_numpy is also available
>>> data.to_numpy()
It is often the case that the observations returned from the environment are NumPy ndarrays but the policy requires
torch.Tensor
for prediction and learning. In this regard, Tianshou provides helper functions to convert the stored data in-place into Numpy arrays or Torch tensors.obj.stack_([a, b])
is the same asBatch.stack([obj, a, b])
, andobj.cat_([a, b])
is the same asBatch.cat([obj, a, b])
. Considering the frequent requirement of concatenating twoBatch
objects, Tianshou also supportsobj.cat_(a)
to be an alias ofobj.cat_([a])
.Batch.cat
andBatch.cat_
does not supportaxis
argument asnp.concatenate
andtorch.cat
currently.Batch.stack
andBatch.stack_
support theaxis
argument so that one can stack batches besides the first dimension. But be cautious, if there are keys that are not shared across all batches,stack
withaxis != 0
is undefined, and will cause an exception currently.
Multi-Agent RL¶
In this section, we describe how to use Tianshou to implement multi-agent reinforcement learning. Specifically, we will design an algorithm to learn how to play Tic Tac Toe (see the image below) against a random opponent.

Tic-Tac-Toe Environment¶
The scripts are located at test/multiagent/
. We have implemented a Tic-Tac-Toe environment inherit the MultiAgentEnv
that supports Tic-Tac-Toe of any scale. Let’s first explore the environment. The 3x3 Tic-Tac-Toe is too easy, so we will focus on 6x6 Tic-Tac-Toe where 4 same signs in a row are considered to win.
>>> from tic_tac_toe_env import TicTacToeEnv # the module tic_tac_toe_env is in test/multiagent/
>>> board_size = 6 # the size of board size
>>> win_size = 4 # how many signs in a row are considered to win
>>>
>>> # This board has 6 rows and 6 cols (36 places in total)
>>> # Players place 'x' and 'o' in turn on the board
>>> # The player who first gets 4 consecutive 'x's or 'o's wins
>>>
>>> env = TicTacToeEnv(size=board_size, win_size=win_size)
>>> obs = env.reset()
>>> env.render() # render the empty board
board (step 0):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
=================
>>> print(obs) # let's see the shape of the observation
{'agent_id': 1,
'obs': array([[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]], dtype=int32),
'mask': array([ True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True,
True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True,
True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True,
True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True])}
The observation variable obs
returned from the environment is a dict
, with three keys agent_id
, obs
, mask
. This is a general structure in multi-agent RL where agents take turns. The meaning of these keys are:
agent_id
: the id of the current acting agent, where agent_id \(\in [1, N]\), N is the number of agents. In our Tic-Tac-Toe case, N is 2. The agent_id starts at 1 because we reserve 0 for the environment itself. Sometimes the developer may want to control the behavior of the environment, for example, to determine how to dispatch cards in Poker.obs
: the actual observation of the environment. In the Tic-Tac-Toe game above, the observation variableobs
is anp.ndarray
with the shape of (6, 6). The values can be “0/1/-1”: 0 for empty, 1 forx
, -1 foro
. Agent 1 placesx
on the board, while agent 2 placeso
on the board.mask
: the action mask in the current timestep. In board games or card games, the legal action set varies with time. The mask is a boolean array. For Tic-Tac-Toe, indexi
means the place ofi/N
th row andi%N
th column. Ifmask[i] == True
, the player can place anx
oro
at that position. Now the board is empty, so the mask is all the true, contains all the positions on the board.
Note
There is no special formulation of mask
either in discrete action space or in continuous action space. You can also use some action spaces like gym.spaces.Discrete
or gym.spaces.Box
to represent the available action space. Currently, we use a boolean array.
Let’s play two steps to have an intuitive understanding of the environment.
>>> import numpy as np
>>> action = 0 # action is either an integer, or an np.ndarray with one element
>>> obs, reward, done, info = env.step(action) # the env.step follows the api of OpenAI Gym
>>> print(obs) # notice the change in the observation
{'agent_id': 2,
'obs': array([[1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0],
[0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0]], dtype=int32),
'mask': array([False, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True,
True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True,
True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True,
True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True, True])}}
>>> # reward has two items, one for each player: 1 for win, -1 for lose, and 0 otherwise
>>> print(reward)
[0. 0.]
>>> print(done) # done indicates whether the game is over
False
>>> # info is always an empty dict in Tic-Tac-Toe, but may contain some useful information in environments other than Tic-Tac-Toe.
>>> print(info)
{}
One worth-noting case is that the game is over when there is only one empty position, rather than when there is no position. This is because the player just has one choice (literally no choice) in this game.
>>> # omitted actions: 6, 1, 7, 2, 8
>>> obs, reward, done, info = env.step(3) # player 1 wins
>>> print((reward, done))
(array([ 1., -1.], dtype=float32), array(True))
>>> env.render() # 'X' and 'O' indicate the last action
board (step 7):
=================
===x x x X _ _===
===o o o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
=================
After being familiar with the environment, let’s try to play with random agents first!
Two Random Agent¶
Tianshou already provides some builtin classes for multi-agent learning. You can check out the API documentation for details. Here we use RandomPolicy
and MultiAgentPolicyManager
. The figure on the right gives an intuitive explanation.
>>> from tianshou.data import Collector
>>> from tianshou.policy import RandomPolicy, MultiAgentPolicyManager
>>>
>>> # agents should be wrapped into one policy,
>>> # which is responsible for calling the acting agent correctly
>>> # here we use two random agents
>>> policy = MultiAgentPolicyManager([RandomPolicy(), RandomPolicy()])
>>>
>>> # use collectors to collect a episode of trajectories
>>> # the reward is a vector, so we need a scalar metric to monitor the training
>>> collector = Collector(policy, env, reward_metric=lambda x: x[0])
>>>
>>> # you will see a long trajectory showing the board status at each timestep
>>> result = collector.collect(n_episode=1, render=.1)
(only show the last 3 steps)
board (step 20):
=================
===o x _ o o o===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===x _ o o x _===
===O _ o o x _===
===x _ o _ _ _===
===x _ _ _ x x===
=================
board (step 21):
=================
===o x _ o o o===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===x _ o o x _===
===o _ o o x _===
===x _ o X _ _===
===x _ _ _ x x===
=================
board (step 22):
=================
===o x _ o o o===
===_ O x _ _ x===
===x _ o o x _===
===o _ o o x _===
===x _ o x _ _===
===x _ _ _ x x===
=================
>>> collector.close()
Random agents perform badly. In the above game, although agent 2 wins finally, it is clear that a smart agent 1 would place an x
at row 4 col 4 to win directly.
Train an MARL Agent¶
So let’s start to train our Tic-Tac-Toe agent! First, import some required modules.
import os
import torch
import argparse
import numpy as np
from copy import deepcopy
from torch.utils.tensorboard import SummaryWriter
from tianshou.env import VectorEnv
from tianshou.utils.net.common import Net
from tianshou.trainer import offpolicy_trainer
from tianshou.data import Collector, ReplayBuffer
from tianshou.policy import BasePolicy, RandomPolicy, DQNPolicy, MultiAgentPolicyManager
from tic_tac_toe_env import TicTacToeEnv
The explanation of each Tianshou class/function will be deferred to their first usages. Here we define some arguments and hyperparameters of the experiment. The meaning of arguments is clear by just looking at their names.
def get_args():
parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('--seed', type=int, default=1626)
parser.add_argument('--eps-test', type=float, default=0.05)
parser.add_argument('--eps-train', type=float, default=0.1)
parser.add_argument('--buffer-size', type=int, default=20000)
parser.add_argument('--lr', type=float, default=1e-3)
parser.add_argument('--gamma', type=float, default=0.1,
help='a smaller gamma favors earlier win')
parser.add_argument('--n-step', type=int, default=3)
parser.add_argument('--target-update-freq', type=int, default=320)
parser.add_argument('--epoch', type=int, default=10)
parser.add_argument('--step-per-epoch', type=int, default=1000)
parser.add_argument('--collect-per-step', type=int, default=10)
parser.add_argument('--batch-size', type=int, default=64)
parser.add_argument('--layer-num', type=int, default=3)
parser.add_argument('--training-num', type=int, default=8)
parser.add_argument('--test-num', type=int, default=100)
parser.add_argument('--logdir', type=str, default='log')
parser.add_argument('--render', type=float, default=0.1)
parser.add_argument('--board_size', type=int, default=6)
parser.add_argument('--win_size', type=int, default=4)
parser.add_argument('--win-rate', type=float, default=np.float32(0.9),
help='the expected winning rate')
parser.add_argument('--watch', default=False, action='store_true',
help='no training, watch the play of pre-trained models')
parser.add_argument('--agent_id', type=int, default=2,
help='the learned agent plays as the agent_id-th player. choices are 1 and 2.')
parser.add_argument('--resume_path', type=str, default='',
help='the path of agent pth file for resuming from a pre-trained agent')
parser.add_argument('--opponent_path', type=str, default='',
help='the path of opponent agent pth file for resuming from a pre-trained agent')
parser.add_argument('--device', type=str,
default='cuda' if torch.cuda.is_available() else 'cpu')
args = parser.parse_known_args()[0]
return args
The following get_agents
function returns agents and their optimizers from either constructing a new policy, or loading from disk, or using the pass-in arguments. For the models:
The action model we use is an instance of
Net
, essentially a multi-layer perceptron with the ReLU activation function;The network model is passed to a
DQNPolicy
, where actions are selected according to both the action mask and their Q-values;The opponent can be either a random agent
RandomPolicy
that randomly chooses an action from legal actions, or it can be a pre-trainedDQNPolicy
allowing learned agents to play with themselves.
Both agents are passed to MultiAgentPolicyManager
, which is responsible to call the correct agent according to the agent_id
in the observation. MultiAgentPolicyManager
also dispatches data to each agent according to agent_id
, so that each agent seems to play with a virtual single-agent environment.
Here it is:
def get_agents(args=get_args(),
agent_learn=None, # BasePolicy
agent_opponent=None, # BasePolicy
optim=None, # torch.optim.Optimizer
): # return a tuple of (BasePolicy, torch.optim.Optimizer)
env = TicTacToeEnv(args.board_size, args.win_size)
args.state_shape = env.observation_space.shape or env.observation_space.n
args.action_shape = env.action_space.shape or env.action_space.n
if agent_learn is None:
net = Net(args.layer_num, args.state_shape, args.action_shape, args.device).to(args.device)
if optim is None:
optim = torch.optim.Adam(net.parameters(), lr=args.lr)
agent_learn = DQNPolicy(
net, optim, args.gamma, args.n_step,
target_update_freq=args.target_update_freq)
if args.resume_path:
agent_learn.load_state_dict(torch.load(args.resume_path))
if agent_opponent is None:
if args.opponent_path:
agent_opponent = deepcopy(agent_learn)
agent_opponent.load_state_dict(torch.load(args.opponent_path))
else:
agent_opponent = RandomPolicy()
if args.agent_id == 1:
agents = [agent_learn, agent_opponent]
else:
agents = [agent_opponent, agent_learn]
policy = MultiAgentPolicyManager(agents)
return policy, optim
With the above preparation, we are close to the first learned agent. The following code is almost the same as the code in the DQN tutorial.
args = get_args()
# the reward is a vector, we need a scalar metric to monitor the training.
# we choose the reward of the learning agent
Collector._default_rew_metric = lambda x: x[args.agent_id - 1]
# ======== a test function that tests a pre-trained agent and exit ======
def watch(args=get_args(),
agent_learn=None, # BasePolicy
agent_opponent=None): # BasePolicy
env = TicTacToeEnv(args.board_size, args.win_size)
policy, optim = get_agents(
args, agent_learn=agent_learn, agent_opponent=agent_opponent)
collector = Collector(policy, env)
result = collector.collect(n_episode=1, render=args.render)
print(f'Final reward: {result["rew"]}, length: {result["len"]}')
collector.close()
if args.watch:
watch(args)
exit(0)
# ======== environment setup =========
env_func = lambda: TicTacToeEnv(args.board_size, args.win_size)
train_envs = VectorEnv([env_func for _ in range(args.training_num)])
test_envs = VectorEnv([env_func for _ in range(args.test_num)])
# seed
np.random.seed(args.seed)
torch.manual_seed(args.seed)
train_envs.seed(args.seed)
test_envs.seed(args.seed)
# ======== agent setup =========
policy, optim = get_agents()
# ======== collector setup =========
train_collector = Collector(policy, train_envs, ReplayBuffer(args.buffer_size))
test_collector = Collector(policy, test_envs)
train_collector.collect(n_step=args.batch_size)
# ======== tensorboard logging setup =========
if not hasattr(args, 'writer'):
log_path = os.path.join(args.logdir, 'tic_tac_toe', 'dqn')
writer = SummaryWriter(log_path)
else:
writer = args.writer
# ======== callback functions used during training =========
def save_fn(policy):
if hasattr(args, 'model_save_path'):
model_save_path = args.model_save_path
else:
model_save_path = os.path.join(
args.logdir, 'tic_tac_toe', 'dqn', 'policy.pth')
torch.save(
policy.policies[args.agent_id - 1].state_dict(),
model_save_path)
def stop_fn(x):
return x >= args.win_rate # 95% winning rate by default
# the default args.win_rate is 0.9, but the reward is [-1, 1]
# instead of [0, 1], so args.win_rate == 0.9 is equal to 95% win rate.
def train_fn(x):
policy.policies[args.agent_id - 1].set_eps(args.eps_train)
def test_fn(x):
policy.policies[args.agent_id - 1].set_eps(args.eps_test)
# start training, this may require about three minutes
result = offpolicy_trainer(
policy, train_collector, test_collector, args.epoch,
args.step_per_epoch, args.collect_per_step, args.test_num,
args.batch_size, train_fn=train_fn, test_fn=test_fn,
stop_fn=stop_fn, save_fn=save_fn, writer=writer,
test_in_train=False)
train_collector.close()
test_collector.close()
agent = policy.policies[args.agent_id - 1]
# let's watch the match!
watch(args, agent)
That’s it. By executing the code, you will see a progress bar indicating the progress of training. After about less than 1 minute, the agent has finished training, and you can see how it plays against the random agent. Here is an example:
Play with random agent
board (step 1):
=================
===_ _ _ X _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
=================
board (step 2):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ O _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
=================
board (step 3):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ X _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
=================
board (step 4):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ O _ _ _===
=================
board (step 5):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ _ X _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
board (step 6):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ _ x _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ O x _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
board (step 7):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ X===
===_ _ _ _ x _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ o x _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
board (step 8):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ x===
===_ _ _ _ x _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ O _===
===_ _ o x _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
board (step 9):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ x===
===_ _ _ _ x _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ o _===
===X _ o x _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
board (step 10):
=================
===_ _ _ x _ x===
===_ _ _ _ x _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
===_ _ O _ o _===
===x _ o x _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
Final reward: 1.0, length: 10.0
Notice that, our learned agent plays the role of agent 2, placing o
on the board. The agent performs pretty well against the random opponent! It learns the rule of the game by trial and error, and learns that four consecutive o
means winning, so it does!
The above code can be executed in a python shell or can be saved as a script file (we have saved it in test/multiagent/test_tic_tac_toe.py
). In the latter case, you can train an agent by
$ python test_tic_tac_toe.py
By default, the trained agent is stored in log/tic_tac_toe/dqn/policy.pth
. You can also make the trained agent play against itself, by
$ python test_tic_tac_toe.py --watch --resume_path=log/tic_tac_toe/dqn/policy.pth --opponent_path=log/tic_tac_toe/dqn/policy.pth
Here is our output:
The trained agent play against itself
board (step 1):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ X _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
=================
board (step 2):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ O _ _ _===
=================
board (step 3):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ X _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ o _ _ _===
=================
board (step 4):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ o O _ _===
=================
board (step 5):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ X _ _===
===_ _ o o _ _===
=================
board (step 6):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o O _===
=================
board (step 7):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ X _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 8):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===O _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 9):
=================
===_ _ _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===o _ _ X _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 10):
=================
===_ O _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ _===
===o _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 11):
=================
===_ o _ _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ X===
===o _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 12):
=================
===_ o O _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 13):
=================
===_ o o _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x X _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 14):
=================
===O o o _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x x _===
===_ _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 15):
=================
===o o o _ _ _===
===_ _ x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x x _===
===X _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 16):
=================
===o o o _ _ _===
===_ O x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x x _===
===x _ _ x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 17):
=================
===o o o _ _ _===
===_ o x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x x _===
===x _ X x _ _===
===_ _ o o o _===
=================
board (step 18):
=================
===o o o _ _ _===
===_ o x _ x _===
===_ _ x _ _ x===
===o _ _ x x _===
===x _ x x _ _===
===_ O o o o _===
=================
Well, although the learned agent plays well against the random agent, it is far away from intelligence.
Next, maybe you can try to build more intelligent agents by letting the agent learn from self-play, just like AlphaZero!
In this tutorial, we show an example of how to use Tianshou for multi-agent RL. Tianshou is a flexible and easy to use RL library. Make the best of Tianshou by yourself!
Train a model-free RL agent within 30s¶
This page summarizes some hyper-parameter tuning experience and code-level trick when training a model-free DRL agent.
You can also contribute to this page with your own tricks :)
Avoid batch-size = 1¶
In the traditional RL training loop, we always use the policy to interact with only one environment for collecting data. That means most of the time the network use batch-size = 1. Quite inefficient! Here is an example of showing how inefficient it is:
import torch, time
from torch import nn
class Net(nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super().__init__()
self.model = nn.Sequential(
nn.Linear(3, 128), nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Linear(128, 128), nn.ReLU(inplace=True),
nn.Linear(128, 1))
def forward(self, s):
return self.model(s)
net = Net()
cnt = 1000
div = 128
a = torch.randn([128, 3])
t = time.time()
for i in range(cnt):
b = net(a)
t1 = (time.time() - t) / cnt
print(t1)
t = time.time()
for i in range(cnt):
for a_ in a.split(a.shape[0] // div):
b = net(a_)
t2 = (time.time() - t) / cnt
print(t2)
print(t2 / t1)
The first test uses batch-size 128, and the second test uses batch-size = 1 for 128 times. In our test, the first is 70-80 times faster than the second.
So how could we avoid the case of batch-size = 1? The answer is synchronize sampling: we create multiple independent environments and sample simultaneously. It is similar to A2C, but other algorithms can also use this method. In our experiments, sampling from more environments benefits not only the sample speed but also the converge speed of neural network (we guess it lowers the sample bias).
By the way, A2C is better than A3C in some cases: A3C needs to act independently and sync the gradient to master, but, in a single node, using A3C to act with batch-size = 1 is quite resource-consuming.
Algorithm specific tricks¶
Here is about the experience of hyper-parameter tuning on CartPole and Pendulum:
DQNPolicy
: use estimation_step greater than 1 and target network, also with a suitable size of replay buffer;PGPolicy
: TBDA2CPolicy
: TBDPPOPolicy
: TBDDDPGPolicy
,TD3Policy
, andSACPolicy
: We found two tricks. The first is to ignore the done flag. The second is to normalize reward to a standard normal distribution (it is against the theoretical analysis, but indeed works very well). The two tricks work amazingly on Mujoco tasks, typically with a faster converge speed (1M -> 200K).On-policy algorithms: increase the repeat-time (to 2 or 4 for trivial benchmark, 10 for mujoco) of the given batch in each training update will make the algorithm more stable.
Code-level optimization¶
Tianshou has many short-but-efficient lines of code. For example, when we want to compute \(V(s)\) and \(V(s')\) by the same network, the best way is to concatenate \(s\) and \(s'\) together instead of computing the value function using twice of network forward.
Finally¶
With fast-speed sampling, we could use large batch-size and large learning rate for faster convergence.
RL algorithms are seed-sensitive. Try more seeds and pick the best. But for our demo, we just used seed = 0 and found it work surprisingly well on policy gradient, so we did not try other seed.

Cheat Sheet¶
This page shows some code snippets of how to use Tianshou to develop new algorithms / apply algorithms to new scenarios.
By the way, some of these issues can be resolved by using a gym.wrapper
. It could be a universal solution in the policy-environment interaction. But you can also use the batch processor Handle Batched Data Stream in Collector.
Build Policy Network¶
See Build the Network.
Build New Policy¶
See BasePolicy
.
Customize Training Process¶
Parallel Sampling¶
Use VectorEnv
or SubprocVectorEnv
.
env_fns = [
lambda: MyTestEnv(size=2),
lambda: MyTestEnv(size=3),
lambda: MyTestEnv(size=4),
lambda: MyTestEnv(size=5),
]
venv = SubprocVectorEnv(env_fns)
where env_fns
is a list of callable env hooker. The above code can be written in for-loop as well:
env_fns = [lambda x=i: MyTestEnv(size=x) for i in [2, 3, 4, 5]]
venv = SubprocVectorEnv(env_fns)
Handle Batched Data Stream in Collector¶
This is related to Issue 42.
If you want to get log stat from data stream / pre-process batch-image / modify the reward with given env info, use preproces_fn
in Collector
. This is a hook which will be called before the data adding into the buffer.
This function receives typically 7 keys, as listed in Batch
, and returns the modified part within a dict or a Batch. For example, you can write your hook as:
import numpy as np
from collections import deque
class MyProcessor:
def __init__(self, size=100):
self.episode_log = None
self.main_log = deque(maxlen=size)
self.main_log.append(0)
self.baseline = 0
def preprocess_fn(**kwargs):
"""change reward to zero mean"""
if 'rew' not in kwargs:
# means that it is called after env.reset(), it can only process the obs
return {} # none of the variables are needed to be updated
else:
n = len(kwargs['rew']) # the number of envs in collector
if self.episode_log is None:
self.episode_log = [[] for i in range(n)]
for i in range(n):
self.episode_log[i].append(kwargs['rew'][i])
kwargs['rew'][i] -= self.baseline
for i in range(n):
if kwargs['done']:
self.main_log.append(np.mean(self.episode_log[i]))
self.episode_log[i] = []
self.baseline = np.mean(self.main_log)
return Batch(rew=kwargs['rew'])
# you can also return with {'rew': kwargs['rew']}
And finally,
test_processor = MyProcessor(size=100)
collector = Collector(policy, env, buffer, test_processor.preprocess_fn)
Some examples are in test/base/test_collector.py.
RNN-style Training¶
This is related to Issue 19.
First, add an argument stack_num
to ReplayBuffer
:
buf = ReplayBuffer(size=size, stack_num=stack_num)
Then, change the network to recurrent-style, for example, class Recurrent
in code snippet 1, or RecurrentActor
and RecurrentCritic
in code snippet 2.
The above code supports only stacked-observation. If you want to use stacked-action (for Q(stacked-s, stacked-a)), stacked-reward, or other stacked variables, you can add a gym.wrapper
to modify the state representation. For example, if we add a wrapper that map [s, a] pair to a new state:
Before: (s, a, s’, r, d) stored in replay buffer, and get stacked s;
After applying wrapper: ([s, a], a, [s’, a’], r, d) stored in replay buffer, and get both stacked s and a.
User-defined Environment and Different State Representation¶
This is related to Issue 38 and Issue 69.
First of all, your self-defined environment must follow the Gym’s API, some of them are listed below:
reset() -> state
step(action) -> state, reward, done, info
seed(s) -> None
render(mode) -> None
close() -> None
observation_space
action_space
The state can be a numpy.ndarray
or a Python dictionary. Take FetchReach-v1
as an example:
>>> e = gym.make('FetchReach-v1')
>>> e.reset()
{'observation': array([ 1.34183265e+00, 7.49100387e-01, 5.34722720e-01, 1.97805133e-04,
7.15193042e-05, 7.73933014e-06, 5.51992816e-08, -2.42927453e-06,
4.73325650e-06, -2.28455228e-06]),
'achieved_goal': array([1.34183265, 0.74910039, 0.53472272]),
'desired_goal': array([1.24073906, 0.77753463, 0.63457791])}
It shows that the state is a dictionary which has 3 keys. It will stored in ReplayBuffer
as:
>>> from tianshou.data import ReplayBuffer
>>> b = ReplayBuffer(size=3)
>>> b.add(obs=e.reset(), act=0, rew=0, done=0)
>>> print(b)
ReplayBuffer(
act: array([0, 0, 0]),
done: array([0, 0, 0]),
info: Batch(),
obs: Batch(
achieved_goal: array([[1.34183265, 0.74910039, 0.53472272],
[0. , 0. , 0. ],
[0. , 0. , 0. ]]),
desired_goal: array([[1.42154265, 0.62505137, 0.62929863],
[0. , 0. , 0. ],
[0. , 0. , 0. ]]),
observation: array([[ 1.34183265e+00, 7.49100387e-01, 5.34722720e-01,
1.97805133e-04, 7.15193042e-05, 7.73933014e-06,
5.51992816e-08, -2.42927453e-06, 4.73325650e-06,
-2.28455228e-06],
[ 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00,
0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00,
0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00,
0.00000000e+00],
[ 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00,
0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00,
0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00, 0.00000000e+00,
0.00000000e+00]]),
),
policy: Batch(),
rew: array([0, 0, 0]),
)
>>> print(b.obs.achieved_goal)
[[1.34183265 0.74910039 0.53472272]
[0. 0. 0. ]
[0. 0. 0. ]]
And the data batch sampled from this replay buffer:
>>> batch, indice = b.sample(2)
>>> batch.keys()
['act', 'done', 'info', 'obs', 'obs_next', 'policy', 'rew']
>>> batch.obs[-1]
Batch(
achieved_goal: array([1.34183265, 0.74910039, 0.53472272]),
desired_goal: array([1.42154265, 0.62505137, 0.62929863]),
observation: array([ 1.34183265e+00, 7.49100387e-01, 5.34722720e-01, 1.97805133e-04,
7.15193042e-05, 7.73933014e-06, 5.51992816e-08, -2.42927453e-06,
4.73325650e-06, -2.28455228e-06]),
)
>>> batch.obs.desired_goal[-1] # recommended
array([1.42154265, 0.62505137, 0.62929863])
>>> batch.obs[-1].desired_goal # not recommended
array([1.42154265, 0.62505137, 0.62929863])
>>> batch[-1].obs.desired_goal # not recommended
array([1.42154265, 0.62505137, 0.62929863])
Thus, in your self-defined network, just change the forward
function as:
def forward(self, s, ...):
# s is a batch
observation = s.observation
achieved_goal = s.achieved_goal
desired_goal = s.desired_goal
...
For self-defined class, the replay buffer will store the reference into a numpy.ndarray
, e.g.:
>>> import networkx as nx
>>> b = ReplayBuffer(size=3)
>>> b.add(obs=nx.Graph(), act=0, rew=0, done=0)
>>> print(b)
ReplayBuffer(
act: array([0, 0, 0]),
done: array([0, 0, 0]),
info: Batch(),
obs: array([<networkx.classes.graph.Graph object at 0x7f5c607826a0>, None,
None], dtype=object),
policy: Batch(),
rew: array([0, 0, 0]),
)
But the state stored in the buffer may be a shallow-copy. To make sure each of your state stored in the buffer is distinct, please return the deep-copy version of your state in your env:
def reset():
return copy.deepcopy(self.graph)
def step(a):
...
return copy.deepcopy(self.graph), reward, done, {}
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning¶
This is related to Issue 121. The discussion is still goes on.
With the flexible core APIs, Tianshou can support multi-agent reinforcement learning with minimal efforts.
Currently, we support three types of multi-agent reinforcement learning paradigms:
Simultaneous move: at each timestep, all the agents take their actions (example: moba games)
Cyclic move: players take action in turn (example: Go game)
Conditional move, at each timestep, the environment conditionally selects an agent to take action. (example: Pig Game)
We mainly address these multi-agent RL problems by converting them into traditional RL formulations.
For simultaneous move, the solution is simple: we can just add a num_agent
dimension to state, action, and reward. Nothing else is going to change.
For 2 & 3 (cyclic move and conditional move), they can be unified into a single framework: at each timestep, the environment selects an agent with id agent_id
to play. Since multi-agents are usually wrapped into one object (which we call “abstract agent”), we can pass the agent_id
to the “abstract agent”, leaving it to further call the specific agent.
In addition, legal actions in multi-agent RL often vary with timestep (just like Go games), so the environment should also passes the legal action mask to the “abstract agent”, where the mask is a boolean array that “True” for available actions and “False” for illegal actions at the current step. Below is a figure that explains the abstract agent.

The above description gives rise to the following formulation of multi-agent RL:
action = policy(state, agent_id, mask)
(next_state, next_agent_id, next_mask), reward = env.step(action)
By constructing a new state state_ = (state, agent_id, mask)
, essentially we can return to the typical formulation of RL:
action = policy(state_)
next_state_, reward = env.step(action)
Following this idea, we write a tiny example of playing Tic Tac Toe against a random player by using a Q-lerning algorithm. The tutorial is at Multi-Agent RL.
tianshou.data¶
-
class
tianshou.data.
Batch
(batch_dict: Optional[Union[dict, Batch, Tuple[Union[dict, Batch]], List[Union[dict, Batch]], numpy.ndarray]] = None, copy: bool = False, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
object
Tianshou provides
Batch
as the internal data structure to pass any kind of data to other methods, for example, a collector gives aBatch
to policy for learning.For a detailed description, please refer to Understand Batch.
-
__getitem__
(index: Union[str, slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray, List[int]]) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Return self[index].
-
__setitem__
(index: Union[str, slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray, List[int]], value: Any) → None[source]¶ Assign value to self[index].
-
static
cat
(batches: List[Union[dict, Batch]]) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Concatenate a list of
Batch
object into a single new batch. For keys that are not shared across all batches, batches that do not have these keys will be padded by zeros with appropriate shapes. E.g.>>> a = Batch(a=np.zeros([3, 4]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([3, 5]))) >>> b = Batch(b=np.zeros([4, 3]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([4, 5]))) >>> c = Batch.cat([a, b]) >>> c.a.shape (7, 4) >>> c.b.shape (7, 3) >>> c.common.c.shape (7, 5)
-
cat_
(batches: Union[Batch, List[Union[dict, Batch]]]) → None[source]¶ Concatenate a list of (or one)
Batch
objects into current batch.
-
static
empty
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, index: Union[str, slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray, List[int]] = None) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Return an empty
Batch
object with 0 orNone
filled, the shape is the same as the givenBatch
.
-
empty_
(index: Union[str, slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray, List[int]] = None) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Return an empty a
Batch
object with 0 orNone
filled. Ifindex
is specified, it will only reset the specific indexed-data.>>> data.empty_() >>> print(data) Batch( a: array([[0., 0.], [0., 0.]]), b: array([None, None], dtype=object), ) >>> b={'c': [2., 'st'], 'd': [1., 0.]} >>> data = Batch(a=[False, True], b=b) >>> data[0] = Batch.empty(data[1]) >>> data Batch( a: array([False, True]), b: Batch( c: array([None, 'st']), d: array([0., 0.]), ), )
-
get
(k: str, d: Optional[Any] = None) → Union[tianshou.data.batch.Batch, Any][source]¶ Return self[k] if k in self else d. d defaults to None.
-
is_empty
(recurse: bool = False)[source]¶ Test if a Batch is empty. If
recurse=True
, it further tests the values of the object; else it only tests the existence of any key.b.is_empty(recurse=True)
is mainly used to distinguishBatch(a=Batch(a=Batch()))
andBatch(a=1)
. They both raise exceptions when applied tolen()
, but the former can be used incat
, while the latter is a scalar and cannot be used incat
.Another usage is in
__len__
, where we have to skip checking the length of recursively empty Batch.>>> Batch().is_empty() True >>> Batch(a=Batch(), b=Batch(c=Batch())).is_empty() False >>> Batch(a=Batch(), b=Batch(c=Batch())).is_empty(recurse=True) True >>> Batch(d=1).is_empty() False >>> Batch(a=np.float64(1.0)).is_empty() False
-
property
shape
¶ Return self.shape.
-
split
(size: Optional[int] = None, shuffle: bool = True) → Iterator[tianshou.data.batch.Batch][source]¶ Split whole data into multiple small batches.
- Parameters
size (int) – if it is
None
, it does not split the data batch; otherwise it will divide the data batch with the given size. Default toNone
.shuffle (bool) – randomly shuffle the entire data batch if it is
True
, otherwise remain in the same. Default toTrue
.
-
static
stack
(batches: List[Union[dict, Batch]], axis: int = 0) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Stack a list of
Batch
object into a single new batch. For keys that are not shared across all batches, batches that do not have these keys will be padded by zeros. E.g.>>> a = Batch(a=np.zeros([4, 4]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([4, 5]))) >>> b = Batch(b=np.zeros([4, 6]), common=Batch(c=np.zeros([4, 5]))) >>> c = Batch.stack([a, b]) >>> c.a.shape (2, 4, 4) >>> c.b.shape (2, 4, 6) >>> c.common.c.shape (2, 4, 5)
Note
If there are keys that are not shared across all batches,
stack
withaxis != 0
is undefined, and will cause an exception.
-
stack_
(batches: List[Union[dict, Batch]], axis: int = 0) → None[source]¶ Stack a list of
Batch
object into current batch.
-
to_torch
(dtype: Optional[torch.dtype] = None, device: Union[str, int, torch.device] = 'cpu') → None[source]¶ Change all numpy.ndarray to torch.Tensor. This is an in-place operation.
-
-
class
tianshou.data.
Collector
(policy: tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy, env: Union[gym.core.Env, tianshou.env.basevecenv.BaseVectorEnv], buffer: Optional[tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer] = None, preprocess_fn: Callable[[Any], Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch]] = None, stat_size: Optional[int] = 100, action_noise: Optional[tianshou.exploration.random.BaseNoise] = None, reward_metric: Optional[Callable[[numpy.ndarray], float]] = None)[source]¶ Bases:
object
The
Collector
enables the policy to interact with different types of environments conveniently.- Parameters
policy – an instance of the
BasePolicy
class.env – a
gym.Env
environment or an instance of theBaseVectorEnv
class.buffer – an instance of the
ReplayBuffer
class, or a list ofReplayBuffer
. If set toNone
, it will automatically assign a small-sizeReplayBuffer
.preprocess_fn (function) – a function called before the data has been added to the buffer, see issue #42 and Handle Batched Data Stream in Collector, defaults to
None
.stat_size (int) – for the moving average of recording speed, defaults to 100.
action_noise (BaseNoise) – add a noise to continuous action. Normally a policy already has a noise param for exploration in training phase, so this is recommended to use in test collector for some purpose.
reward_metric (function) – to be used in multi-agent RL. The reward to report is of shape [agent_num], but we need to return a single scalar to monitor training. This function specifies what is the desired metric, e.g., the reward of agent 1 or the average reward over all agents. By default, the behavior is to select the reward of agent 1.
The
preprocess_fn
is a function called before the data has been added to the buffer with batch format, which receives up to 7 keys as listed inBatch
. It will receive with onlyobs
when the collector resets the environment. It returns either a dict or aBatch
with the modified keys and values. Examples are in “test/base/test_collector.py”.Example:
policy = PGPolicy(...) # or other policies if you wish env = gym.make('CartPole-v0') replay_buffer = ReplayBuffer(size=10000) # here we set up a collector with a single environment collector = Collector(policy, env, buffer=replay_buffer) # the collector supports vectorized environments as well envs = VectorEnv([lambda: gym.make('CartPole-v0') for _ in range(3)]) buffers = [ReplayBuffer(size=5000) for _ in range(3)] # you can also pass a list of replay buffer to collector, for multi-env # collector = Collector(policy, envs, buffer=buffers) collector = Collector(policy, envs, buffer=replay_buffer) # collect at least 3 episodes collector.collect(n_episode=3) # collect 1 episode for the first env, 3 for the third env collector.collect(n_episode=[1, 0, 3]) # collect at least 2 steps collector.collect(n_step=2) # collect episodes with visual rendering (the render argument is the # sleep time between rendering consecutive frames) collector.collect(n_episode=1, render=0.03) # sample data with a given number of batch-size: batch_data = collector.sample(batch_size=64) # policy.learn(batch_data) # btw, vanilla policy gradient only # supports on-policy training, so here we pick all data in the buffer batch_data = collector.sample(batch_size=0) policy.learn(batch_data) # on-policy algorithms use the collected data only once, so here we # clear the buffer collector.reset_buffer()
For the scenario of collecting data from multiple environments to a single buffer, the cache buffers will turn on automatically. It may return the data more than the given limitation.
Note
Please make sure the given environment has a time limitation.
-
collect
(n_step: int = 0, n_episode: Union[int, List[int]] = 0, random: bool = False, render: Optional[float] = None, log_fn: Optional[Callable[[dict], None]] = None) → Dict[str, float][source]¶ Collect a specified number of step or episode.
- Parameters
n_step (int) – how many steps you want to collect.
n_episode (int or list) – how many episodes you want to collect (in each environment).
random (bool) – whether to use random policy for collecting data, defaults to
False
.render (float) – the sleep time between rendering consecutive frames, defaults to
None
(no rendering).log_fn (function) – a function which receives env info, typically for tensorboard logging.
Note
One and only one collection number specification is permitted, either
n_step
orn_episode
.- Returns
A dict including the following keys
n/ep
the collected number of episodes.n/st
the collected number of steps.v/st
the speed of steps per second.v/ep
the speed of episode per second.rew
the mean reward over collected episodes.len
the mean length over collected episodes.
-
reset_env
() → None[source]¶ Reset all of the environment(s)’ states and reset all of the cache buffers (if need).
-
sample
(batch_size: int) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Sample a data batch from the internal replay buffer. It will call
process_fn()
before returning the final batch data.- Parameters
batch_size (int) –
0
means it will extract all the data from the buffer, otherwise it will extract the data with the given batch_size.
-
class
tianshou.data.
ListReplayBuffer
(**kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer
The function of
ListReplayBuffer
is almost the same asReplayBuffer
. The only difference is thatListReplayBuffer
is based onlist
. Therefore, it does not support advanced indexing, which means you cannot sample a batch of data out of it. It is typically used for storing data.See also
Please refer to
ReplayBuffer
for more detailed explanation.
-
class
tianshou.data.
PrioritizedReplayBuffer
(size: int, alpha: float, beta: float, mode: str = 'weight', replace: bool = False, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer
Prioritized replay buffer implementation.
- Parameters
alpha (float) – the prioritization exponent.
beta (float) – the importance sample soft coefficient.
mode (str) – defaults to
weight
.replace (bool) – whether to sample with replacement
See also
Please refer to
ReplayBuffer
for more detailed explanation.-
__getitem__
(index: Union[slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray]) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Return a data batch: self[index]. If stack_num is set to be > 0, return the stacked obs and obs_next with shape [batch, len, …].
-
add
(obs: Union[dict, numpy.ndarray], act: Union[numpy.ndarray, float], rew: Union[int, float], done: bool, obs_next: Optional[Union[dict, numpy.ndarray]] = None, info: dict = {}, policy: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch]] = {}, weight: float = 1.0, **kwargs) → None[source]¶ Add a batch of data into replay buffer.
-
property
replace
¶
-
class
tianshou.data.
ReplayBuffer
(size: int, stack_num: Optional[int] = 0, ignore_obs_next: bool = False, sample_avail: bool = False, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
object
ReplayBuffer
stores data generated from interaction between the policy and environment. The current implementation of Tianshou typically use 7 reserved keys inBatch
:obs
the observation of step \(t\) ;act
the action of step \(t\) ;rew
the reward of step \(t\) ;done
the done flag of step \(t\) ;obs_next
the observation of step \(t+1\) ;info
the info of step \(t\) (ingym.Env
, theenv.step()
function returns 4 arguments, and the last one isinfo
);policy
the data computed by policy in step \(t\);
The following code snippet illustrates its usage:
>>> import numpy as np >>> from tianshou.data import ReplayBuffer >>> buf = ReplayBuffer(size=20) >>> for i in range(3): ... buf.add(obs=i, act=i, rew=i, done=i, obs_next=i + 1, info={}) >>> buf.obs # since we set size = 20, len(buf.obs) == 20. array([0., 1., 2., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.]) >>> # but there are only three valid items, so len(buf) == 3. >>> len(buf) 3 >>> buf2 = ReplayBuffer(size=10) >>> for i in range(15): ... buf2.add(obs=i, act=i, rew=i, done=i, obs_next=i + 1, info={}) >>> len(buf2) 10 >>> buf2.obs # since its size = 10, it only stores the last 10 steps' result. array([10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9.]) >>> # move buf2's result into buf (meanwhile keep it chronologically) >>> buf.update(buf2) array([ 0., 1., 2., 5., 6., 7., 8., 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0., 0.]) >>> # get a random sample from buffer >>> # the batch_data is equal to buf[incide]. >>> batch_data, indice = buf.sample(batch_size=4) >>> batch_data.obs == buf[indice].obs array([ True, True, True, True])
ReplayBuffer
also supports frame_stack sampling (typically for RNN usage, see issue#19), ignoring storing the next observation (save memory in atari tasks), and multi-modal observation (see issue#38):>>> buf = ReplayBuffer(size=9, stack_num=4, ignore_obs_next=True) >>> for i in range(16): ... done = i % 5 == 0 ... buf.add(obs={'id': i}, act=i, rew=i, done=done, ... obs_next={'id': i + 1}) >>> print(buf) # you can see obs_next is not saved in buf ReplayBuffer( act: array([ 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 15., 7., 8.]), done: array([0., 1., 0., 0., 0., 0., 1., 0., 0.]), info: Batch(), obs: Batch( id: array([ 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 15., 7., 8.]), ), policy: Batch(), rew: array([ 9., 10., 11., 12., 13., 14., 15., 7., 8.]), ) >>> index = np.arange(len(buf)) >>> print(buf.get(index, 'obs').id) [[ 7. 7. 8. 9.] [ 7. 8. 9. 10.] [11. 11. 11. 11.] [11. 11. 11. 12.] [11. 11. 12. 13.] [11. 12. 13. 14.] [12. 13. 14. 15.] [ 7. 7. 7. 7.] [ 7. 7. 7. 8.]] >>> # here is another way to get the stacked data >>> # (stack only for obs and obs_next) >>> abs(buf.get(index, 'obs')['id'] - buf[index].obs.id).sum().sum() 0.0 >>> # we can get obs_next through __getitem__, even if it doesn't exist >>> print(buf[:].obs_next.id) [[ 7. 8. 9. 10.] [ 7. 8. 9. 10.] [11. 11. 11. 12.] [11. 11. 12. 13.] [11. 12. 13. 14.] [12. 13. 14. 15.] [12. 13. 14. 15.] [ 7. 7. 7. 8.] [ 7. 7. 8. 9.]]
- Parameters
size (int) – the size of replay buffer.
stack_num (int) – the frame-stack sampling argument, should be greater than 1, defaults to 0 (no stacking).
ignore_obs_next (bool) – whether to store obs_next, defaults to
False
.sample_avail (bool) – the parameter indicating sampling only available index when using frame-stack sampling method, defaults to
False
. This feature is not supported in Prioritized Replay Buffer currently.
-
__getitem__
(index: Union[slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray]) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Return a data batch: self[index]. If stack_num is set to be > 0, return the stacked obs and obs_next with shape [batch, len, …].
-
add
(obs: Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray], act: Union[numpy.ndarray, float], rew: Union[int, float], done: bool, obs_next: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, info: dict = {}, policy: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch]] = {}, **kwargs) → None[source]¶ Add a batch of data into replay buffer.
-
get
(indice: Union[slice, int, numpy.integer, numpy.ndarray], key: str, stack_num: Optional[int] = None) → Union[tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray][source]¶ Return the stacked result, e.g. [s_{t-3}, s_{t-2}, s_{t-1}, s_t], where s is self.key, t is indice. The stack_num (here equals to 4) is given from buffer initialization procedure.
-
tianshou.data.
to_numpy
(x: Union[tianshou.data.batch.Batch, dict, list, tuple, numpy.ndarray, torch.Tensor]) → Union[tianshou.data.batch.Batch, dict, list, tuple, numpy.ndarray, torch.Tensor][source]¶ Return an object without torch.Tensor.
-
tianshou.data.
to_torch
(x: Union[tianshou.data.batch.Batch, dict, list, tuple, numpy.ndarray, torch.Tensor], dtype: Optional[torch.dtype] = None, device: Union[str, int, torch.device] = 'cpu') → Union[tianshou.data.batch.Batch, dict, list, tuple, numpy.ndarray, torch.Tensor][source]¶ Return an object without np.ndarray.
tianshou.env¶
-
class
tianshou.env.
BaseVectorEnv
(env_fns: List[Callable[], gym.core.Env]])[source]¶ Bases:
abc.ABC
,gym.core.Env
Base class for vectorized environments wrapper. Usage:
env_num = 8 envs = VectorEnv([lambda: gym.make(task) for _ in range(env_num)]) assert len(envs) == env_num
It accepts a list of environment generators. In other words, an environment generator
efn
of a specific task means thatefn()
returns the environment of the given task, for example,gym.make(task)
.All of the VectorEnv must inherit
BaseVectorEnv
. Here are some other usages:envs.seed(2) # which is equal to the next line envs.seed([2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]) # set specific seed for each env obs = envs.reset() # reset all environments obs = envs.reset([0, 5, 7]) # reset 3 specific environments obs, rew, done, info = envs.step([1] * 8) # step synchronously envs.render() # render all environments envs.close() # close all environments
-
abstract
__getattr__
(key: str)[source]¶ Try to retrieve an attribute from each individual wrapped environment, if it does not belong to the wrapping vector environment class.
-
abstract
close
() → None[source]¶ Close all of the environments.
Environments will automatically close() themselves when garbage collected or when the program exits.
-
abstract
reset
(id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None)[source]¶ Reset the state of all the environments and return initial observations if id is
None
, otherwise reset the specific environments with given id, either an int or a list.
-
abstract
seed
(seed: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → List[int][source]¶ Set the seed for all environments.
Accept
None
, an int (which will extendi
to[i, i + 1, i + 2, ...]
) or a list.- Returns
The list of seeds used in this env’s random number generators. The first value in the list should be the “main” seed, or the value which a reproducer pass to “seed”.
-
abstract
step
(action: numpy.ndarray, id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → Tuple[numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray][source]¶ Run one timestep of all the environments’ dynamics if id is
None
, otherwise run one timestep for some environments with given id, either an int or a list. When the end of episode is reached, you are responsible for calling reset(id) to reset this environment’s state.Accept a batch of action and return a tuple (obs, rew, done, info).
- Parameters
action (numpy.ndarray) – a batch of action provided by the agent.
- Returns
A tuple including four items:
obs
a numpy.ndarray, the agent’s observation of current environmentsrew
a numpy.ndarray, the amount of rewards returned after previous actionsdone
a numpy.ndarray, whether these episodes have ended, in which case further step() calls will return undefined resultsinfo
a numpy.ndarray, contains auxiliary diagnostic information (helpful for debugging, and sometimes learning)
-
abstract
-
class
tianshou.env.
MultiAgentEnv
(**kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
abc.ABC
,gym.core.Env
The interface for multi-agent environments. Multi-agent environments must be wrapped as
MultiAgentEnv
. Here is the usage:env = MultiAgentEnv(...) # obs is a dict containing obs, agent_id, and mask obs = env.reset() action = policy(obs) obs, rew, done, info = env.step(action) env.close()
The available action’s mask is set to 1, otherwise it is set to 0. Further usage can be found at Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning.
-
abstract
reset
() → dict[source]¶ Reset the state. Return the initial state, first agent_id, and the initial action set, for example,
{'obs': obs, 'agent_id': agent_id, 'mask': mask}
-
abstract
step
(action: numpy.ndarray) → Tuple[dict, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray][source]¶ Run one timestep of the environment’s dynamics. When the end of episode is reached, you are responsible for calling reset() to reset the environment’s state.
Accept action and return a tuple (obs, rew, done, info).
- Parameters
action (numpy.ndarray) – action provided by a agent.
- Returns
A tuple including four items:
obs
a dict containing obs, agent_id, and mask, which means that it is theagent_id
player’s turn to play withobs
observation andmask
.rew
a numpy.ndarray, the amount of rewards returned after previous actions. Depending on the specific environment, this can be either a scalar reward for current agent or a vector reward for all the agents.done
a numpy.ndarray, whether the episode has ended, in which case further step() calls will return undefined resultsinfo
a numpy.ndarray, contains auxiliary diagnostic information (helpful for debugging, and sometimes learning)
-
abstract
-
class
tianshou.env.
RayVectorEnv
(env_fns: List[Callable[], gym.core.Env]])[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.env.basevecenv.BaseVectorEnv
Vectorized environment wrapper based on ray. However, according to our test, it is about two times slower than
SubprocVectorEnv
.See also
Please refer to
BaseVectorEnv
for more detailed explanation.-
__getattr__
(key)[source]¶ Try to retrieve an attribute from each individual wrapped environment, if it does not belong to the wrapping vector environment class.
-
close
() → List[Any][source]¶ Close all of the environments.
Environments will automatically close() themselves when garbage collected or when the program exits.
-
reset
(id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → numpy.ndarray[source]¶ Reset the state of all the environments and return initial observations if id is
None
, otherwise reset the specific environments with given id, either an int or a list.
-
seed
(seed: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → List[int][source]¶ Set the seed for all environments.
Accept
None
, an int (which will extendi
to[i, i + 1, i + 2, ...]
) or a list.- Returns
The list of seeds used in this env’s random number generators. The first value in the list should be the “main” seed, or the value which a reproducer pass to “seed”.
-
step
(action: numpy.ndarray, id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → Tuple[numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray][source]¶ Run one timestep of all the environments’ dynamics if id is
None
, otherwise run one timestep for some environments with given id, either an int or a list. When the end of episode is reached, you are responsible for calling reset(id) to reset this environment’s state.Accept a batch of action and return a tuple (obs, rew, done, info).
- Parameters
action (numpy.ndarray) – a batch of action provided by the agent.
- Returns
A tuple including four items:
obs
a numpy.ndarray, the agent’s observation of current environmentsrew
a numpy.ndarray, the amount of rewards returned after previous actionsdone
a numpy.ndarray, whether these episodes have ended, in which case further step() calls will return undefined resultsinfo
a numpy.ndarray, contains auxiliary diagnostic information (helpful for debugging, and sometimes learning)
-
-
class
tianshou.env.
SubprocVectorEnv
(env_fns: List[Callable[], gym.core.Env]])[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.env.basevecenv.BaseVectorEnv
Vectorized environment wrapper based on subprocess.
See also
Please refer to
BaseVectorEnv
for more detailed explanation.-
__getattr__
(key)[source]¶ Try to retrieve an attribute from each individual wrapped environment, if it does not belong to the wrapping vector environment class.
-
close
() → List[Any][source]¶ Close all of the environments.
Environments will automatically close() themselves when garbage collected or when the program exits.
-
reset
(id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → numpy.ndarray[source]¶ Reset the state of all the environments and return initial observations if id is
None
, otherwise reset the specific environments with given id, either an int or a list.
-
seed
(seed: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → List[int][source]¶ Set the seed for all environments.
Accept
None
, an int (which will extendi
to[i, i + 1, i + 2, ...]
) or a list.- Returns
The list of seeds used in this env’s random number generators. The first value in the list should be the “main” seed, or the value which a reproducer pass to “seed”.
-
step
(action: numpy.ndarray, id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → Tuple[numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray][source]¶ Run one timestep of all the environments’ dynamics if id is
None
, otherwise run one timestep for some environments with given id, either an int or a list. When the end of episode is reached, you are responsible for calling reset(id) to reset this environment’s state.Accept a batch of action and return a tuple (obs, rew, done, info).
- Parameters
action (numpy.ndarray) – a batch of action provided by the agent.
- Returns
A tuple including four items:
obs
a numpy.ndarray, the agent’s observation of current environmentsrew
a numpy.ndarray, the amount of rewards returned after previous actionsdone
a numpy.ndarray, whether these episodes have ended, in which case further step() calls will return undefined resultsinfo
a numpy.ndarray, contains auxiliary diagnostic information (helpful for debugging, and sometimes learning)
-
-
class
tianshou.env.
VectorEnv
(env_fns: List[Callable[], gym.core.Env]])[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.env.basevecenv.BaseVectorEnv
Dummy vectorized environment wrapper, implemented in for-loop.
See also
Please refer to
BaseVectorEnv
for more detailed explanation.-
__getattr__
(key)[source]¶ Try to retrieve an attribute from each individual wrapped environment, if it does not belong to the wrapping vector environment class.
-
close
() → List[Any][source]¶ Close all of the environments.
Environments will automatically close() themselves when garbage collected or when the program exits.
-
reset
(id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → numpy.ndarray[source]¶ Reset the state of all the environments and return initial observations if id is
None
, otherwise reset the specific environments with given id, either an int or a list.
-
seed
(seed: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → List[int][source]¶ Set the seed for all environments.
Accept
None
, an int (which will extendi
to[i, i + 1, i + 2, ...]
) or a list.- Returns
The list of seeds used in this env’s random number generators. The first value in the list should be the “main” seed, or the value which a reproducer pass to “seed”.
-
step
(action: numpy.ndarray, id: Optional[Union[int, List[int]]] = None) → Tuple[numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray, numpy.ndarray][source]¶ Run one timestep of all the environments’ dynamics if id is
None
, otherwise run one timestep for some environments with given id, either an int or a list. When the end of episode is reached, you are responsible for calling reset(id) to reset this environment’s state.Accept a batch of action and return a tuple (obs, rew, done, info).
- Parameters
action (numpy.ndarray) – a batch of action provided by the agent.
- Returns
A tuple including four items:
obs
a numpy.ndarray, the agent’s observation of current environmentsrew
a numpy.ndarray, the amount of rewards returned after previous actionsdone
a numpy.ndarray, whether these episodes have ended, in which case further step() calls will return undefined resultsinfo
a numpy.ndarray, contains auxiliary diagnostic information (helpful for debugging, and sometimes learning)
-
tianshou.policy¶
-
class
tianshou.policy.
A2CPolicy
(actor: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, dist_fn: torch.distributions.distribution.Distribution = <class 'torch.distributions.categorical.Categorical'>, discount_factor: float = 0.99, vf_coef: float = 0.5, ent_coef: float = 0.01, max_grad_norm: Optional[float] = None, gae_lambda: float = 0.95, reward_normalization: bool = False, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.modelfree.pg.PGPolicy
Implementation of Synchronous Advantage Actor-Critic. arXiv:1602.01783
- Parameters
actor (torch.nn.Module) – the actor network following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)critic (torch.nn.Module) – the critic network. (s -> V(s))
optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for actor and critic network.
dist_fn (torch.distributions.Distribution) – for computing the action, defaults to
torch.distributions.Categorical
.discount_factor (float) – in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
vf_coef (float) – weight for value loss, defaults to 0.5.
ent_coef (float) – weight for entropy loss, defaults to 0.01.
max_grad_norm (float) – clipping gradients in back propagation, defaults to
None
.gae_lambda (float) – in [0, 1], param for Generalized Advantage Estimation, defaults to 0.95.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which has 4 keys:act
the action.logits
the network’s raw output.dist
the action distribution.state
the hidden state.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, batch_size: int, repeat: int, **kwargs) → Dict[str, List[float]][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
process_fn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute the discounted returns for each frame:
\[G_t = \sum_{i=t}^T \gamma^{i-t}r_i\], where \(T\) is the terminal time step, \(\gamma\) is the discount factor, \(\gamma \in [0, 1]\).
-
class
tianshou.policy.
BasePolicy
(**kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
abc.ABC
,torch.nn.modules.module.Module
Tianshou aims to modularizing RL algorithms. It comes into several classes of policies in Tianshou. All of the policy classes must inherit
BasePolicy
.A policy class typically has four parts:
__init__()
: initialize the policy, including coping the target network and so on;forward()
: compute action with given observation;process_fn()
: pre-process data from the replay buffer (this function can interact with replay buffer);learn()
: update policy with a given batch of data.
Most of the policy needs a neural network to predict the action and an optimizer to optimize the policy. The rules of self-defined networks are:
Input: observation
obs
(may be anumpy.ndarray
, atorch.Tensor
, a dict or any others), hidden statestate
(for RNN usage), and other informationinfo
provided by the environment.Output: some
logits
, the next hidden statestate
, and the intermediate result during policy forwarding procedurepolicy
. Thelogits
could be a tuple instead of atorch.Tensor
. It depends on how the policy process the network output. For example, in PPO, the return of the network might be(mu, sigma), state
for Gaussian policy. Thepolicy
can be a Batch of torch.Tensor or other things, which will be stored in the replay buffer, and can be accessed in the policy update process (e.g. inpolicy.learn()
, thebatch.policy
is what you need).
Since
BasePolicy
inheritstorch.nn.Module
, you can useBasePolicy
almost the same astorch.nn.Module
, for instance, loading and saving the model:torch.save(policy.state_dict(), 'policy.pth') policy.load_state_dict(torch.load('policy.pth'))
-
static
compute_episodic_return
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, v_s_: Optional[Union[numpy.ndarray, torch.Tensor]] = None, gamma: float = 0.99, gae_lambda: float = 0.95) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute returns over given full-length episodes, including the implementation of Generalized Advantage Estimator (arXiv:1506.02438).
- Parameters
batch (
Batch
) – a data batch which contains several full-episode data chronologically.v_s (numpy.ndarray) – the value function of all next states \(V(s')\).
gamma (float) – the discount factor, should be in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
gae_lambda (float) – the parameter for Generalized Advantage Estimation, should be in [0, 1], defaults to 0.95.
- Returns
a Batch. The result will be stored in batch.returns as a numpy array.
-
static
compute_nstep_return
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray, target_q_fn: Callable[[tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, numpy.ndarray], torch.Tensor], gamma: float = 0.99, n_step: int = 1, rew_norm: bool = False) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute n-step return for Q-learning targets:
\[G_t = \sum_{i = t}^{t + n - 1} \gamma^{i - t}(1 - d_i)r_i + \gamma^n (1 - d_{t + n}) Q_{\mathrm{target}}(s_{t + n})\], where \(\gamma\) is the discount factor, \(\gamma \in [0, 1]\), \(d_t\) is the done flag of step \(t\).
- Parameters
batch (
Batch
) – a data batch, which is equal to buffer[indice].buffer (
ReplayBuffer
) – a data buffer which contains several full-episode data chronologically.indice (numpy.ndarray) – sampled timestep.
target_q_fn (function) – a function receives \(t+n-1\) step’s data and compute target Q value.
gamma (float) – the discount factor, should be in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
n_step (int) – the number of estimation step, should be an int greater than 0, defaults to 1.
rew_norm (bool) – normalize the reward to Normal(0, 1), defaults to
False
.
- Returns
a Batch. The result will be stored in batch.returns as a torch.Tensor with shape (bsz, ).
-
abstract
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which MUST have the following keys:act
an numpy.ndarray or a torch.Tensor, the action over given batch data.state
a dict, an numpy.ndarray or a torch.Tensor, the internal state of the policy,None
as default.
Other keys are user-defined. It depends on the algorithm. For example,
# some code return Batch(logits=..., act=..., state=None, dist=...)
After version >= 0.2.3, the keyword “policy” is reserverd and the corresponding data will be stored into the replay buffer in numpy. For instance,
# some code return Batch(..., policy=Batch(log_prob=dist.log_prob(act))) # and in the sampled data batch, you can directly call # batch.policy.log_prob to get your data, although it is stored in # np.ndarray.
-
abstract
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, Union[float, List[float]]][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
class
tianshou.policy.
DDPGPolicy
(actor: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, actor_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, critic: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, tau: float = 0.005, gamma: float = 0.99, exploration_noise: Optional[tianshou.exploration.random.BaseNoise] = <tianshou.exploration.random.GaussianNoise object>, action_range: Optional[Tuple[float, float]] = None, reward_normalization: bool = False, ignore_done: bool = False, estimation_step: int = 1, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy
Implementation of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient. arXiv:1509.02971
- Parameters
actor (torch.nn.Module) – the actor network following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)actor_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for actor network.
critic (torch.nn.Module) – the critic network. (s, a -> Q(s, a))
critic_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for critic network.
tau (float) – param for soft update of the target network, defaults to 0.005.
gamma (float) – discount factor, in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
exploration_noise (BaseNoise) – the exploration noise, add to the action, defaults to
GaussianNoise(sigma=0.1)
.action_range ((float, float)) – the action range (minimum, maximum).
reward_normalization (bool) – normalize the reward to Normal(0, 1), defaults to
False
.ignore_done (bool) – ignore the done flag while training the policy, defaults to
False
.estimation_step (int) – greater than 1, the number of steps to look ahead.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, model: str = 'actor', input: str = 'obs', explorating: bool = True, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which has 2 keys:act
the action.state
the hidden state.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, float][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
process_fn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Pre-process the data from the provided replay buffer. Check out Policy for more information.
-
class
tianshou.policy.
DQNPolicy
(model: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, discount_factor: float = 0.99, estimation_step: int = 1, target_update_freq: Optional[int] = 0, reward_normalization: bool = False, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy
Implementation of Deep Q Network. arXiv:1312.5602 Implementation of Double Q-Learning. arXiv:1509.06461
- Parameters
model (torch.nn.Module) – a model following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – a torch.optim for optimizing the model.
discount_factor (float) – in [0, 1].
estimation_step (int) – greater than 1, the number of steps to look ahead.
target_update_freq (int) – the target network update frequency (
0
if you do not use the target network).reward_normalization (bool) – normalize the reward to Normal(0, 1), defaults to
False
.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, model: str = 'model', input: str = 'obs', eps: Optional[float] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data. If you need to mask the action, please add a “mask” into batch.obs, for example, if we have an environment that has “0/1/2” three actions:
batch == Batch( obs=Batch( obs="original obs, with batch_size=1 for demonstration", mask=np.array([[False, True, False]]), # action 1 is available # action 0 and 2 are unavailable ), ... )
- Parameters
eps (float) – in [0, 1], for epsilon-greedy exploration method.
- Returns
A
Batch
which has 3 keys:act
the action.logits
the network’s raw output.state
the hidden state.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, float][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
process_fn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute the n-step return for Q-learning targets. More details can be found at
compute_nstep_return()
.
-
class
tianshou.policy.
ImitationPolicy
(model: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, mode: str = 'continuous')[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy
Implementation of vanilla imitation learning (for continuous action space).
- Parameters
model (torch.nn.Module) – a model following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> a)optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – for optimizing the model.
mode (str) – indicate the imitation type (“continuous” or “discrete” action space), defaults to “continuous”.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which MUST have the following keys:act
an numpy.ndarray or a torch.Tensor, the action over given batch data.state
a dict, an numpy.ndarray or a torch.Tensor, the internal state of the policy,None
as default.
Other keys are user-defined. It depends on the algorithm. For example,
# some code return Batch(logits=..., act=..., state=None, dist=...)
After version >= 0.2.3, the keyword “policy” is reserverd and the corresponding data will be stored into the replay buffer in numpy. For instance,
# some code return Batch(..., policy=Batch(log_prob=dist.log_prob(act))) # and in the sampled data batch, you can directly call # batch.policy.log_prob to get your data, although it is stored in # np.ndarray.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, float][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
class
tianshou.policy.
MultiAgentPolicyManager
(policies: List[tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy])[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy
This multi-agent policy manager accepts a list of
BasePolicy
. It dispatches the batch data to each of these policies when the “forward” is called. The same as “process_fn” and “learn”: it splits the data and feeds them to each policy. A figure in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning can help you better understand this procedure.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ - Parameters
state – if None, it means all agents have no state. If not None, it should contain keys of “agent_1”, “agent_2”, …
- Returns
a Batch with the following contents:
{ "act": actions corresponding to the input "state":{ "agent_1": output state of agent_1's policy for the state "agent_2": xxx ... "agent_n": xxx} "out":{ "agent_1": output of agent_1's policy for the input "agent_2": xxx ... "agent_n": xxx} }
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, Union[float, List[float]]][source]¶ - Returns
a dict with the following contents:
{ "agent_1/item1": item 1 of agent_1's policy.learn output "agent_1/item2": item 2 of agent_1's policy.learn output "agent_2/xxx": xxx ... "agent_n/xxx": xxx }
-
process_fn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Save original multi-dimensional rew in “save_rew”, set rew to the reward of each agent during their
process_fn
, and restore the original reward afterwards.
-
-
class
tianshou.policy.
PGPolicy
(model: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, dist_fn: torch.distributions.distribution.Distribution = <class 'torch.distributions.categorical.Categorical'>, discount_factor: float = 0.99, reward_normalization: bool = False, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy
Implementation of Vanilla Policy Gradient.
- Parameters
model (torch.nn.Module) – a model following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – a torch.optim for optimizing the model.
dist_fn (torch.distributions.Distribution) – for computing the action.
discount_factor (float) – in [0, 1].
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which has 4 keys:act
the action.logits
the network’s raw output.dist
the action distribution.state
the hidden state.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, batch_size: int, repeat: int, **kwargs) → Dict[str, List[float]][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
process_fn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute the discounted returns for each frame:
\[G_t = \sum_{i=t}^T \gamma^{i-t}r_i\], where \(T\) is the terminal time step, \(\gamma\) is the discount factor, \(\gamma \in [0, 1]\).
-
class
tianshou.policy.
PPOPolicy
(actor: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, dist_fn: torch.distributions.distribution.Distribution, discount_factor: float = 0.99, max_grad_norm: Optional[float] = None, eps_clip: float = 0.2, vf_coef: float = 0.5, ent_coef: float = 0.01, action_range: Optional[Tuple[float, float]] = None, gae_lambda: float = 0.95, dual_clip: Optional[float] = None, value_clip: bool = True, reward_normalization: bool = True, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.modelfree.pg.PGPolicy
Implementation of Proximal Policy Optimization. arXiv:1707.06347
- Parameters
actor (torch.nn.Module) – the actor network following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)critic (torch.nn.Module) – the critic network. (s -> V(s))
optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for actor and critic network.
dist_fn (torch.distributions.Distribution) – for computing the action.
discount_factor (float) – in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
max_grad_norm (float) – clipping gradients in back propagation, defaults to
None
.eps_clip (float) – \(\epsilon\) in \(L_{CLIP}\) in the original paper, defaults to 0.2.
vf_coef (float) – weight for value loss, defaults to 0.5.
ent_coef (float) – weight for entropy loss, defaults to 0.01.
action_range ((float, float)) – the action range (minimum, maximum).
gae_lambda (float) – in [0, 1], param for Generalized Advantage Estimation, defaults to 0.95.
dual_clip (float) – a parameter c mentioned in arXiv:1912.09729 Equ. 5, where c > 1 is a constant indicating the lower bound, defaults to 5.0 (set
None
if you do not want to use it).value_clip (bool) – a parameter mentioned in arXiv:1811.02553 Sec. 4.1, defaults to
True
.reward_normalization (bool) – normalize the returns to Normal(0, 1), defaults to
True
.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which has 4 keys:act
the action.logits
the network’s raw output.dist
the action distribution.state
the hidden state.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, batch_size: int, repeat: int, **kwargs) → Dict[str, List[float]][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
process_fn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, buffer: tianshou.data.buffer.ReplayBuffer, indice: numpy.ndarray) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute the discounted returns for each frame:
\[G_t = \sum_{i=t}^T \gamma^{i-t}r_i\], where \(T\) is the terminal time step, \(\gamma\) is the discount factor, \(\gamma \in [0, 1]\).
-
class
tianshou.policy.
RandomPolicy
(**kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy
A random agent used in multi-agent learning. It randomly chooses an action from the legal action.
-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute the random action over the given batch data. The input should contain a mask in batch.obs, with “True” to be available and “False” to be unavailable. For example,
batch.obs.mask == np.array([[False, True, False]])
means with batch size 1, action “1” is available but action “0” and “2” are unavailable.- Returns
A
Batch
with “act” key, containing the random action.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
-
class
tianshou.policy.
SACPolicy
(actor: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, actor_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, critic1: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic1_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, critic2: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic2_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, tau: float = 0.005, gamma: float = 0.99, alpha: Tuple[float, torch.Tensor, torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer] = 0.2, action_range: Optional[Tuple[float, float]] = None, reward_normalization: bool = False, ignore_done: bool = False, estimation_step: int = 1, exploration_noise: Optional[tianshou.exploration.random.BaseNoise] = None, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.modelfree.ddpg.DDPGPolicy
Implementation of Soft Actor-Critic. arXiv:1812.05905
- Parameters
actor (torch.nn.Module) – the actor network following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)actor_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for actor network.
critic1 (torch.nn.Module) – the first critic network. (s, a -> Q(s, a))
critic1_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for the first critic network.
critic2 (torch.nn.Module) – the second critic network. (s, a -> Q(s, a))
critic2_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for the second critic network.
tau (float) – param for soft update of the target network, defaults to 0.005.
gamma (float) – discount factor, in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
exploration_noise (BaseNoise) – the noise intensity, add to the action, defaults to 0.1.
torch.Tensor, torch.optim.Optimizer) or float alpha ((float,) – entropy regularization coefficient, default to 0.2. If a tuple (target_entropy, log_alpha, alpha_optim) is provided, then alpha is automatatically tuned.
action_range ((float, float)) – the action range (minimum, maximum).
reward_normalization (bool) – normalize the reward to Normal(0, 1), defaults to
False
.ignore_done (bool) – ignore the done flag while training the policy, defaults to
False
.exploration_noise – add a noise to action for exploration. This is useful when solving hard-exploration problem.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
forward
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, state: Optional[Union[dict, tianshou.data.batch.Batch, numpy.ndarray]] = None, input: str = 'obs', explorating: bool = True, **kwargs) → tianshou.data.batch.Batch[source]¶ Compute action over the given batch data.
- Returns
A
Batch
which has 2 keys:act
the action.state
the hidden state.
See also
Please refer to
forward()
for more detailed explanation.
-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, float][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
-
class
tianshou.policy.
TD3Policy
(actor: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, actor_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, critic1: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic1_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, critic2: torch.nn.modules.module.Module, critic2_optim: torch.optim.optimizer.Optimizer, tau: float = 0.005, gamma: float = 0.99, exploration_noise: Optional[tianshou.exploration.random.BaseNoise] = <tianshou.exploration.random.GaussianNoise object>, policy_noise: float = 0.2, update_actor_freq: int = 2, noise_clip: float = 0.5, action_range: Optional[Tuple[float, float]] = None, reward_normalization: bool = False, ignore_done: bool = False, estimation_step: int = 1, **kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.policy.modelfree.ddpg.DDPGPolicy
Implementation of Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, arXiv:1802.09477
- Parameters
actor (torch.nn.Module) – the actor network following the rules in
BasePolicy
. (s -> logits)actor_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for actor network.
critic1 (torch.nn.Module) – the first critic network. (s, a -> Q(s, a))
critic1_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for the first critic network.
critic2 (torch.nn.Module) – the second critic network. (s, a -> Q(s, a))
critic2_optim (torch.optim.Optimizer) – the optimizer for the second critic network.
tau (float) – param for soft update of the target network, defaults to 0.005.
gamma (float) – discount factor, in [0, 1], defaults to 0.99.
exploration_noise (float) – the exploration noise, add to the action, defaults to
GaussianNoise(sigma=0.1)
policy_noise (float) – the noise used in updating policy network, default to 0.2.
update_actor_freq (int) – the update frequency of actor network, default to 2.
noise_clip (float) – the clipping range used in updating policy network, default to 0.5.
action_range ((float, float)) – the action range (minimum, maximum).
reward_normalization (bool) – normalize the reward to Normal(0, 1), defaults to
False
.ignore_done (bool) – ignore the done flag while training the policy, defaults to
False
.
See also
Please refer to
BasePolicy
for more detailed explanation.-
learn
(batch: tianshou.data.batch.Batch, **kwargs) → Dict[str, float][source]¶ Update policy with a given batch of data.
- Returns
A dict which includes loss and its corresponding label.
Warning
If you use
torch.distributions.Normal
andtorch.distributions.Categorical
to calculate the log_prob, please be careful about the shape: Categorical distribution gives “[batch_size]” shape while Normal distribution gives “[batch_size, 1]” shape. The auto-broadcasting of numerical operation with torch tensors will amplify this error.
tianshou.trainer¶
-
tianshou.trainer.
gather_info
(start_time: float, train_c: tianshou.data.collector.Collector, test_c: tianshou.data.collector.Collector, best_reward: float) → Dict[str, Union[float, str]][source]¶ A simple wrapper of gathering information from collectors.
- Returns
A dictionary with the following keys:
train_step
the total collected step of training collector;train_episode
the total collected episode of training collector;train_time/collector
the time for collecting frames in the training collector;train_time/model
the time for training models;train_speed
the speed of training (frames per second);test_step
the total collected step of test collector;test_episode
the total collected episode of test collector;test_time
the time for testing;test_speed
the speed of testing (frames per second);best_reward
the best reward over the test results;duration
the total elapsed time.
-
tianshou.trainer.
offpolicy_trainer
(policy: tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy, train_collector: tianshou.data.collector.Collector, test_collector: tianshou.data.collector.Collector, max_epoch: int, step_per_epoch: int, collect_per_step: int, episode_per_test: Union[int, List[int]], batch_size: int, update_per_step: int = 1, train_fn: Optional[Callable[[int], None]] = None, test_fn: Optional[Callable[[int], None]] = None, stop_fn: Optional[Callable[[float], bool]] = None, save_fn: Optional[Callable[[tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy], None]] = None, log_fn: Optional[Callable[[dict], None]] = None, writer: Optional[torch.utils.tensorboard.writer.SummaryWriter] = None, log_interval: int = 1, verbose: bool = True, test_in_train: bool = True) → Dict[str, Union[float, str]][source]¶ A wrapper for off-policy trainer procedure.
- Parameters
policy – an instance of the
BasePolicy
class.train_collector (
Collector
) – the collector used for training.test_collector (
Collector
) – the collector used for testing.max_epoch (int) – the maximum of epochs for training. The training process might be finished before reaching the
max_epoch
.step_per_epoch (int) – the number of step for updating policy network in one epoch.
collect_per_step (int) – the number of frames the collector would collect before the network update. In other words, collect some frames and do some policy network update.
episode_per_test – the number of episodes for one policy evaluation.
batch_size (int) – the batch size of sample data, which is going to feed in the policy network.
update_per_step (int) – the number of times the policy network would be updated after frames be collected. In other words, collect some frames and do some policy network update.
train_fn (function) – a function receives the current number of epoch index and performs some operations at the beginning of training in this epoch.
test_fn (function) – a function receives the current number of epoch index and performs some operations at the beginning of testing in this epoch.
save_fn (function) – a function for saving policy when the undiscounted average mean reward in evaluation phase gets better.
stop_fn (function) – a function receives the average undiscounted returns of the testing result, return a boolean which indicates whether reaching the goal.
log_fn (function) – a function receives env info for logging.
writer (torch.utils.tensorboard.SummaryWriter) – a TensorBoard SummaryWriter.
log_interval (int) – the log interval of the writer.
verbose (bool) – whether to print the information.
test_in_train (bool) – whether to test in the training phase.
- Returns
See
gather_info()
.
-
tianshou.trainer.
onpolicy_trainer
(policy: tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy, train_collector: tianshou.data.collector.Collector, test_collector: tianshou.data.collector.Collector, max_epoch: int, step_per_epoch: int, collect_per_step: int, repeat_per_collect: int, episode_per_test: Union[int, List[int]], batch_size: int, train_fn: Optional[Callable[[int], None]] = None, test_fn: Optional[Callable[[int], None]] = None, stop_fn: Optional[Callable[[float], bool]] = None, save_fn: Optional[Callable[[tianshou.policy.base.BasePolicy], None]] = None, log_fn: Optional[Callable[[dict], None]] = None, writer: Optional[torch.utils.tensorboard.writer.SummaryWriter] = None, log_interval: int = 1, verbose: bool = True, test_in_train: bool = True) → Dict[str, Union[float, str]][source]¶ A wrapper for on-policy trainer procedure.
- Parameters
policy – an instance of the
BasePolicy
class.train_collector (
Collector
) – the collector used for training.test_collector (
Collector
) – the collector used for testing.max_epoch (int) – the maximum of epochs for training. The training process might be finished before reaching the
max_epoch
.step_per_epoch (int) – the number of step for updating policy network in one epoch.
collect_per_step (int) – the number of frames the collector would collect before the network update. In other words, collect some frames and do one policy network update.
repeat_per_collect (int) – the number of repeat time for policy learning, for example, set it to 2 means the policy needs to learn each given batch data twice.
episode_per_test (int or list of ints) – the number of episodes for one policy evaluation.
batch_size (int) – the batch size of sample data, which is going to feed in the policy network.
train_fn (function) – a function receives the current number of epoch index and performs some operations at the beginning of training in this epoch.
test_fn (function) – a function receives the current number of epoch index and performs some operations at the beginning of testing in this epoch.
save_fn (function) – a function for saving policy when the undiscounted average mean reward in evaluation phase gets better.
stop_fn (function) – a function receives the average undiscounted returns of the testing result, return a boolean which indicates whether reaching the goal.
log_fn (function) – a function receives env info for logging.
writer (torch.utils.tensorboard.SummaryWriter) – a TensorBoard SummaryWriter.
log_interval (int) – the log interval of the writer.
verbose (bool) – whether to print the information.
test_in_train (bool) – whether to test in the training phase.
- Returns
See
gather_info()
.
tianshou.exploration¶
-
class
tianshou.exploration.
BaseNoise
(**kwargs)[source]¶ Bases:
abc.ABC
,object
The action noise base class.
-
class
tianshou.exploration.
GaussianNoise
(mu: float = 0.0, sigma: float = 1.0)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.exploration.random.BaseNoise
Class for vanilla gaussian process, used for exploration in DDPG by default.
-
class
tianshou.exploration.
OUNoise
(mu: float = 0.0, sigma: float = 0.3, theta: float = 0.15, dt: float = 0.01, x0: Optional[Union[float, numpy.ndarray]] = None)[source]¶ Bases:
tianshou.exploration.random.BaseNoise
Class for Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, as used for exploration in DDPG. Usage:
# init self.noise = OUNoise() # generate noise noise = self.noise(logits.shape, eps)
For required parameters, you can refer to the stackoverflow page. However, our experiment result shows that (similar to OpenAI SpinningUp) using vanilla gaussian process has little difference from using the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process.
tianshou.utils¶
-
class
tianshou.utils.
MovAvg
(size: int = 100)[source]¶ Bases:
object
Class for moving average. It will automatically exclude the infinity and NaN. Usage:
>>> stat = MovAvg(size=66) >>> stat.add(torch.tensor(5)) 5.0 >>> stat.add(float('inf')) # which will not add to stat 5.0 >>> stat.add([6, 7, 8]) 6.5 >>> stat.get() 6.5 >>> print(f'{stat.mean():.2f}±{stat.std():.2f}') 6.50±1.12
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.common.
Net
(layer_num, state_shape, action_shape=0, device='cpu', softmax=False, concat=False, hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
Simple MLP backbone. For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
- Parameters
concat – whether the input shape is concatenated by state_shape and action_shape. If it is True,
action_shape
is not the output shape, but affects the input shape.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.common.
Recurrent
(layer_num, state_shape, action_shape, device='cpu', hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
Simple Recurrent network based on LSTM. For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.discrete.
Actor
(preprocess_net, action_shape, hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.discrete.
Critic
(preprocess_net, hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.discrete.
DQN
(h, w, action_shape, device='cpu')[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.continuous.
Actor
(preprocess_net, action_shape, max_action, device='cpu', hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.continuous.
ActorProb
(preprocess_net, action_shape, max_action, device='cpu', unbounded=False, hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.continuous.
Critic
(preprocess_net, device='cpu', hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.continuous.
RecurrentActorProb
(layer_num, state_shape, action_shape, max_action, device='cpu', hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
-
class
tianshou.utils.net.continuous.
RecurrentCritic
(layer_num, state_shape, action_shape=0, device='cpu', hidden_layer_size=128)[source]¶ Bases:
torch.nn.modules.module.Module
For advanced usage (how to customize the network), please refer to Build the Network.
Contributing to Tianshou¶
Install Develop Version¶
To install Tianshou in an “editable” mode, run
$ git checkout dev
$ pip install -e ".[dev]"
in the main directory. This installation is removable by
$ python setup.py develop --uninstall
PEP8 Code Style Check¶
We follow PEP8 python code style. To check, in the main directory, run:
$ flake8 . --count --show-source --statistics
Test Locally¶
This command will run automatic tests in the main directory
$ pytest test --cov tianshou -s --durations 0 -v
Test by GitHub Actions¶
Click the
Actions
button in your own repo:

Click the green button:

You will see
Actions Enabled.
on the top of html page.When you push a new commit to your own repo (e.g.
git push
), it will automatically run the test in this page:

Documentation¶
Documentations are written under the docs/
directory as ReStructuredText (.rst
) files. index.rst
is the main page. A Tutorial on ReStructuredText can be found here.
API References are automatically generated by Sphinx according to the outlines under docs/api/
and should be modified when any code changes.
To compile documentation into webpages, run
$ make html
under the docs/
directory. The generated webpages are in docs/_build
and can be viewed with browsers.
Chinese documentation is in https://tianshou.readthedocs.io/zh/latest/, and the develop version of documentation is in https://tianshou.readthedocs.io/en/dev/.
Pull Request¶
All of the commits should merge through the pull request to the dev
branch. The pull request must have 2 approvals before merging.
Contributor¶
We always welcome contributions to help make Tianshou better. Below are an incomplete list of our contributors (find more on this page).
Jiayi Weng (Trinkle23897)
Minghao Zhang (Mehooz)
Alexis Duburcq (duburcqa)
Kaichao You (youkaichao)