Assistax: A Hardware-Accelerated Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Assistive Robotics

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Hinckeldey, Leonard, Fosong, Elliot, Miller, Elle, Rubavicius, Rimvydas, McInroe, Trevor, Wollstadt, Patricia, Wiebel-Herboth, Christiane B., Ramamoorthy, Subramanian, Albrecht, Stefano V.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Hinckeldey, Leonard
Fosong, Elliot
Miller, Elle
Rubavicius, Rimvydas
McInroe, Trevor
Wollstadt, Patricia
Wiebel-Herboth, Christiane B.
Ramamoorthy, Subramanian
Albrecht, Stefano V.
author_facet Hinckeldey, Leonard
Fosong, Elliot
Miller, Elle
Rubavicius, Rimvydas
McInroe, Trevor
Wollstadt, Patricia
Wiebel-Herboth, Christiane B.
Ramamoorthy, Subramanian
Albrecht, Stefano V.
contents The development of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms has been largely driven by ambitious challenge tasks and benchmarks. Games have dominated RL benchmarks because they present relevant challenges, are inexpensive to run and easy to understand. While games such as Go and Atari have led to many breakthroughs, they often do not directly translate to real-world embodied applications. In recognising the need to diversify RL benchmarks and addressing complexities that arise in embodied interaction scenarios, we introduce Assistax: an open-source benchmark designed to address challenges arising in assistive robotics tasks. Assistax uses JAX's hardware acceleration for significant speed-ups for learning in physics-based simulations. In terms of open-loop wall-clock time, Assistax runs up to $370\times$ faster when vectorising training runs compared to CPU-based alternatives. Assistax conceptualises the interaction between an assistive robot and an active human patient using multi-agent RL to train a population of diverse partner agents against which an embodied robotic agent's zero-shot coordination capabilities can be tested. Extensive evaluation and hyperparameter tuning for popular continuous control RL and MARL algorithms provide reliable baselines and establish Assistax as a practical benchmark for advancing RL research for assistive robotics. The code is available at: https://github.com/assistive-autonomy/assistax.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21638
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Assistax: A Hardware-Accelerated Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Assistive Robotics
Hinckeldey, Leonard
Fosong, Elliot
Miller, Elle
Rubavicius, Rimvydas
McInroe, Trevor
Wollstadt, Patricia
Wiebel-Herboth, Christiane B.
Ramamoorthy, Subramanian
Albrecht, Stefano V.
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
The development of reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms has been largely driven by ambitious challenge tasks and benchmarks. Games have dominated RL benchmarks because they present relevant challenges, are inexpensive to run and easy to understand. While games such as Go and Atari have led to many breakthroughs, they often do not directly translate to real-world embodied applications. In recognising the need to diversify RL benchmarks and addressing complexities that arise in embodied interaction scenarios, we introduce Assistax: an open-source benchmark designed to address challenges arising in assistive robotics tasks. Assistax uses JAX's hardware acceleration for significant speed-ups for learning in physics-based simulations. In terms of open-loop wall-clock time, Assistax runs up to $370\times$ faster when vectorising training runs compared to CPU-based alternatives. Assistax conceptualises the interaction between an assistive robot and an active human patient using multi-agent RL to train a population of diverse partner agents against which an embodied robotic agent's zero-shot coordination capabilities can be tested. Extensive evaluation and hyperparameter tuning for popular continuous control RL and MARL algorithms provide reliable baselines and establish Assistax as a practical benchmark for advancing RL research for assistive robotics. The code is available at: https://github.com/assistive-autonomy/assistax.
title Assistax: A Hardware-Accelerated Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Assistive Robotics
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21638