Getting StartedΒΆ

Install AgileRL

To use AgileRL, first download the source code and install requirements.

Install as a package with pip:

pip install agilerl

Or install in development mode:

git clone https://github.com/AgileRL/AgileRL.git && cd AgileRL
pip install -e .

If you wish to install all additional dependencies please specify [all] or if you want to install a specific family of dependencies specify that family directly. At present, we have just one family, [llm], which contains the dependencies related to our LLM RFT algorithms (datasets, deepspeed, peft, transformers, vllm).

pip install agilerl[all]

Or in development mode:

pip install -e ".[all]"

To install the nightly version of AgileRL with the latest features, use:

pip install git+https://github.com/AgileRL/AgileRL.git@nightly

Algorithms

On-policy

Algorithms: PPO

Off-policy

Algorithms: DQN, Rainbow DQN, TD3, DDPG

Offline

Algorithms: CQL, ILQL

Multi Agent

Algorithms: MADDPG, MATD3, IPPO

Contextual Bandits

Algorithms: NeuralUCB, NeuralTS

LLM Finetuning

Algorithms: DPO, GRPO

Tutorials

We are constantly updating our tutorials to showcase the latest features of AgileRL and how users can leverage our evolutionary HPO to achieve 10x faster hyperparameter optimization. Please see the available tutorials below.

Tutorial Type

Description

Tutorials

Single-agent tasks

Guides for training both on and off-policy agents to beat a variety of Gymnasium environments.

PPO - Acrobot
TD3 - Lunar Lander
Rainbow DQN - CartPole Recurrent PPO - Masked Pendulum

Multi-agent tasks

Use of PettingZoo environments such as training DQN to play Connect Four with curriculum learning and self-play, and for multi-agent tasks in MPE environments.

DQN - Connect Four
MADDPG - Space Invaders
MATD3 - Speaker Listener

Hierarchical curriculum learning

Shows how to teach agents Skills and combine them to achieve an end goal.

PPO - Lunar Lander

Contextual multi-arm bandits

Learn to make the correct decision in environments that only have one timestep.

NeuralUCB - Iris Dataset
NeuralTS - PenDigits

Custom Modules & Networks

Learn how to create custom evolvable modules and networks for RL algorithms.

Dueling Distributional Q Network
EvolvableSimBa

LLM Finetuning

Learn how to finetune an LLM using AgileRL.

GRPO

Train an Agent

Train an agent to beat a Gym environment.

Before starting training, there are some meta-hyperparameters and settings that must be set. These are defined in INIT_HP, for general parameters, and MUTATION_PARAMS, which define the evolutionary probabilities, and NET_CONFIG, which defines the network architecture. For example:

Algorithm Hyperparameters
INIT_HP = {
    'ENV_NAME': 'LunarLander-v3',   # Gym environment name
    'ALGO': 'DQN',                  # Algorithm
    'DOUBLE': True,                 # Use double Q-learning
    'CHANNELS_LAST': False,         # Swap image channels dimension from last to first [H, W, C] -> [C, H, W]
    'BATCH_SIZE': 256,              # Batch size
    'LR': 1e-3,                     # Learning rate
    'MAX_STEPS': 1_000_000,         # Max no. steps
    'TARGET_SCORE': 200.,           # Early training stop at avg score of last 100 episodes
    'GAMMA': 0.99,                  # Discount factor
    'MEMORY_SIZE': 10000,           # Max memory buffer size
    'LEARN_STEP': 1,                # Learning frequency
    'TAU': 1e-3,                    # For soft update of target parameters
    'TOURN_SIZE': 2,                # Tournament size
    'ELITISM': True,                # Elitism in tournament selection
    'POP_SIZE': 6,                  # Population size
    'EVO_STEPS': 10_000,            # Evolution frequency
    'EVAL_STEPS': None,             # Evaluation steps
    'EVAL_LOOP': 1,                 # Evaluation episodes
    'LEARNING_DELAY': 1000,         # Steps before starting learning
    'WANDB': True,                  # Log with Weights and Biases
}
Mutation Hyperparameters
MUTATION_PARAMS = {
    # Relative probabilities
    'NO_MUT': 0.4,                              # No mutation
    'ARCH_MUT': 0.2,                            # Architecture mutation
    'NEW_LAYER': 0.2,                           # New layer mutation
    'PARAMS_MUT': 0.2,                          # Network parameters mutation
    'ACT_MUT': 0,                               # Activation layer mutation
    'RL_HP_MUT': 0.2,                           # Learning HP mutation
    'MUT_SD': 0.1,                              # Mutation strength
    'RAND_SEED': 1,                             # Random seed
}
Network Configuration
NET_CONFIG = {
    'latent_dim': 16
    'encoder_config': {
      'hidden_size': [32]     # Observation encoder configuration
    }
    'head_config': {
      'hidden_size': [32]     # Network head configuration
    }

}

Creating a Population of Agents

First, use utils.utils.create_population to create a list of agents - our population that will evolve and mutate to the optimal hyperparameters.

Population Creation Example
import torch
from agilerl.utils.utils import (
    make_vect_envs,
    create_population,
    observation_space_channels_to_first
)

device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")

num_envs = 16
env = make_vect_envs(env_name=INIT_HP['ENV_NAME'], num_envs=num_envs)

observation_space = env.single_observation_space
action_space = env.single_action_space
if INIT_HP['CHANNELS_LAST']:
    observation_space = observation_space_channels_to_first(observation_space)

agent_pop = create_population(
    algo=INIT_HP['ALGO'],                 # Algorithm
    observation_space=observation_space,  # Observation space
    action_space=action_space,            # Action space
    net_config=NET_CONFIG,                # Network configuration
    INIT_HP=INIT_HP,                      # Initial hyperparameters
    population_size=INIT_HP['POP_SIZE'],  # Population size
    num_envs=num_envs,                    # Number of vectorized environments
    device=device
)

Initializing Evolutionary HPO

Next, create the tournament, mutations and experience replay buffer objects that allow agents to share memory and efficiently perform evolutionary HPO.

Mutations and Tournament Selection Example
from agilerl.components.replay_buffer import ReplayBuffer
from agilerl.hpo.tournament import TournamentSelection
from agilerl.hpo.mutation import Mutations

memory = ReplayBuffer(
    max_size=INIT_HP['MEMORY_SIZE'],   # Max replay buffer size
    device=device,
)

tournament = TournamentSelection(
    tournament_size=INIT_HP['TOURN_SIZE'], # Tournament selection size
    elitism=INIT_HP['ELITISM'],            # Elitism in tournament selection
    population_size=INIT_HP['POP_SIZE'],   # Population size
    eval_loop=INIT_HP['EVAL_LOOP'],        # Evaluate using last N fitness scores
)

mutations = Mutations(
    no_mutation=MUTATION_PARAMS['NO_MUT'],                # No mutation
    architecture=MUTATION_PARAMS['ARCH_MUT'],             # Architecture mutation
    new_layer_prob=MUTATION_PARAMS['NEW_LAYER'],          # New layer mutation
    parameters=MUTATION_PARAMS['PARAMS_MUT'],             # Network parameters mutation
    activation=MUTATION_PARAMS['ACT_MUT'],                # Activation layer mutation
    rl_hp=MUTATION_PARAMS['RL_HP_MUT'],                   # Learning HP mutation
    mutation_sd=MUTATION_PARAMS['MUT_SD'],                # Mutation strength
    rand_seed=MUTATION_PARAMS['RAND_SEED'],               # Random seed
    device=device,
)

Train a Population of Agents

The easiest training loop implementation is to use our train_off_policy() function. It requires the agent have methods get_action() and learn().

Training Example
from agilerl.training.train_off_policy import train_off_policy

trained_pop, pop_fitnesses = train_off_policy(
    env=env,                                   # Gym-style environment
    env_name=INIT_HP['ENV_NAME'],              # Environment name
    algo=INIT_HP['ALGO'],                      # Algorithm
    pop=agent_pop,                             # Population of agents
    memory=memory,                             # Replay buffer
    swap_channels=INIT_HP['CHANNELS_LAST'],    # Swap image channel from last to first
    max_steps=INIT_HP["MAX_STEPS"],            # Max number of training steps
    evo_steps=INIT_HP['EVO_STEPS'],            # Evolution frequency
    eval_steps=INIT_HP["EVAL_STEPS"],          # Number of steps in evaluation episode
    eval_loop=INIT_HP["EVAL_LOOP"],            # Number of evaluation episodes
    learning_delay=INIT_HP['LEARNING_DELAY'],  # Steps before starting learning
    target=INIT_HP['TARGET_SCORE'],            # Target score for early stopping
    tournament=tournament,                     # Tournament selection object
    mutation=mutations,                        # Mutations object
    wb=INIT_HP['WANDB'],                       # Weights and Biases tracking
)