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Hauptverfasser: Radji, Waris, Michel, Thomas, Piteau, Hector
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01764
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author Radji, Waris
Michel, Thomas
Piteau, Hector
author_facet Radji, Waris
Michel, Thomas
Piteau, Hector
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) research requires diverse, challenging environments that are both tractable and scalable. While modern video games may offer rich dynamics, they are computationally expensive and poorly suited for large-scale experimentation due to their CPU-bound execution. We introduce Octax, a high-performance suite of classic arcade game environments implemented in JAX, based on CHIP-8 emulation, a predecessor to Atari, which is widely adopted as a benchmark in RL research. Octax provides the JAX community with a long-awaited end-to-end GPU alternative to the Atari benchmark, offering image-based environments, spanning puzzle, action, and strategy genres, all executable at massive scale on modern GPUs. Our JAX-based implementation achieves orders-of-magnitude speedups over traditional CPU emulators while maintaining perfect fidelity to the original game mechanics. We demonstrate Octax's capabilities by training RL agents across multiple games, showing significant improvements in training speed and scalability compared to existing solutions. The environment's modular design enables researchers to easily extend the suite with new games or generate novel environments using large language models, making it an ideal platform for large-scale RL experimentation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Octax: Accelerated CHIP-8 Arcade Environments for Reinforcement Learning in JAX
Radji, Waris
Michel, Thomas
Piteau, Hector
Machine Learning
Reinforcement learning (RL) research requires diverse, challenging environments that are both tractable and scalable. While modern video games may offer rich dynamics, they are computationally expensive and poorly suited for large-scale experimentation due to their CPU-bound execution. We introduce Octax, a high-performance suite of classic arcade game environments implemented in JAX, based on CHIP-8 emulation, a predecessor to Atari, which is widely adopted as a benchmark in RL research. Octax provides the JAX community with a long-awaited end-to-end GPU alternative to the Atari benchmark, offering image-based environments, spanning puzzle, action, and strategy genres, all executable at massive scale on modern GPUs. Our JAX-based implementation achieves orders-of-magnitude speedups over traditional CPU emulators while maintaining perfect fidelity to the original game mechanics. We demonstrate Octax's capabilities by training RL agents across multiple games, showing significant improvements in training speed and scalability compared to existing solutions. The environment's modular design enables researchers to easily extend the suite with new games or generate novel environments using large language models, making it an ideal platform for large-scale RL experimentation.
title Octax: Accelerated CHIP-8 Arcade Environments for Reinforcement Learning in JAX
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01764