Kinetix: Investigating the Training of General Agents through Open-Ended Physics-Based Control Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Matthews, Michael, Beukman, Michael, Lu, Chris, Foerster, Jakob
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Matthews, Michael
Beukman, Michael
Lu, Chris
Foerster, Jakob
author_facet Matthews, Michael
Beukman, Michael
Lu, Chris
Foerster, Jakob
contents While large models trained with self-supervised learning on offline datasets have shown remarkable capabilities in text and image domains, achieving the same generalisation for agents that act in sequential decision problems remains an open challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by procedurally generating tens of millions of 2D physics-based tasks and using these to train a general reinforcement learning (RL) agent for physical control. To this end, we introduce Kinetix: an open-ended space of physics-based RL environments that can represent tasks ranging from robotic locomotion and grasping to video games and classic RL environments, all within a unified framework. Kinetix makes use of our novel hardware-accelerated physics engine Jax2D that allows us to cheaply simulate billions of environment steps during training. Our trained agent exhibits strong physical reasoning capabilities in 2D space, being able to zero-shot solve unseen human-designed environments. Furthermore, fine-tuning this general agent on tasks of interest shows significantly stronger performance than training an RL agent *tabula rasa*. This includes solving some environments that standard RL training completely fails at. We believe this demonstrates the feasibility of large scale, mixed-quality pre-training for online RL and we hope that Kinetix will serve as a useful framework to investigate this further.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_23208
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Kinetix: Investigating the Training of General Agents through Open-Ended Physics-Based Control Tasks
Matthews, Michael
Beukman, Michael
Lu, Chris
Foerster, Jakob
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
While large models trained with self-supervised learning on offline datasets have shown remarkable capabilities in text and image domains, achieving the same generalisation for agents that act in sequential decision problems remains an open challenge. In this work, we take a step towards this goal by procedurally generating tens of millions of 2D physics-based tasks and using these to train a general reinforcement learning (RL) agent for physical control. To this end, we introduce Kinetix: an open-ended space of physics-based RL environments that can represent tasks ranging from robotic locomotion and grasping to video games and classic RL environments, all within a unified framework. Kinetix makes use of our novel hardware-accelerated physics engine Jax2D that allows us to cheaply simulate billions of environment steps during training. Our trained agent exhibits strong physical reasoning capabilities in 2D space, being able to zero-shot solve unseen human-designed environments. Furthermore, fine-tuning this general agent on tasks of interest shows significantly stronger performance than training an RL agent *tabula rasa*. This includes solving some environments that standard RL training completely fails at. We believe this demonstrates the feasibility of large scale, mixed-quality pre-training for online RL and we hope that Kinetix will serve as a useful framework to investigate this further.
title Kinetix: Investigating the Training of General Agents through Open-Ended Physics-Based Control Tasks
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.23208