[Paper] [Installation] [Usage] [Mortar Mayhem] [Endless Mortar Mayhem] [Mystery Path] [Endless Mystery Path] [Searing Spotlights] [Endless Searing Spotlights] [Training]

	Endless Mortar Mayhem	Endless Mystery Path	Endless Searing Spotlights
Agent Observation
Ground Truth

Memory Gym features the environments Mortar Mayhem, Mystery Path, and Searing Spotlights that are inspired by some mini games of Pummel Party. These 2D environments benchmark the memory capabilities of agents. Especially, these environments feature endless task variants. As the agent's policy improves, the task goes on. The cumulative memory game "I packed my bag ..." inspired this dynamic concept, which allows for examining levels of effectiveness instead of just sample efficiency. Interactive videos, based on selected agent behavios, can be found here: https://marcometer.github.io/

Preprint Journal Paper (under review)

@misc{pleines2024memory,
      title={Memory Gym: Towards Endless Tasks to Benchmark Memory Capabilities of Agents}, 
      author={Marco Pleines and Matthias Pallasch and Frank Zimmer and Mike Preuss},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2309.17207},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG}
}

ICLR Paper

@inproceedings{pleines2023memory,
      title={Memory Gym: Partially Observable Challenges to Memory-Based Agents},
      author={Marco Pleines and Matthias Pallasch and Frank Zimmer and Mike Preuss},
      booktitle={International Conference on Learning Representations},
      year={2023},
      url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=jHc8dCx6DDr}
}

Major dependencies:

• gymnasium==0.29.0
• PyGame==2.4.0

conda create -n memory-gym python=3.11 --yes
conda activate memory-gym
pip install memory-gym

or

conda create -n memory-gym python=3.11 --yes
conda activate memory-gym
git clone https://github.com/MarcoMeter/drl-memory-gym.git
cd drl-memory-gym
pip install -e .

Executing the environment using random actions:

import memory_gym
import gymnasium as gym

env = gym.make("Endless-SearingSpotlights-v0")
# env = gym.make("SearingSpotlights-v0")
# env = gym.make("Endless-MortarMayhem-v0")
# env = gym.make("MortarMayhem-v0")
# env = gym.make("MortarMayhem-Grid-v0")
# env = gym.make("MortarMayhemB-v0")
# env = gym.make("MortarMayhemB-Grid-v0")
# env = gym.make("Endless-MysteryPath-v0")
# env = gym.make("MysteryPath-v0")
# env = gym.make("MysteryPath-Grid-v0")

# Pass reset parameters to the environment
options = {"agent_scale": 0.25}

obs, info = env.reset(seed=1, options=options)
done = False
while not done:
    obs, reward, done, truncation, info = env.step(env.action_space.sample())

print(info)

Manually play the environments using the console scripts (works only using an anaconda environment):

mortar_mayhem
# MMAct
mortar_mayhem_b
# MMGrid
mortar_mayhem_grid
# MMAct Grid
mortar_mayhem_b_grid
mystery_path
mystery_path_grid
searing_spotlights

# Endless Environments
endless_mortar_mayhem
endless_mystery_path
endless_searing_spotlights

You can also execute the python scripts directly, for example:

python ./memory_gym/mortar_mayhem.py

Controls:

• WASD or Arrow Keys to move or rotate
• Page Up / Page Down to increment / decrement environment seeds

Agent Observation	Ground Truth

Mortar Mayhem challenges the agent with a sequence of commands that the agent has to memorize and execute in the right order. During the beginning of the episode, each command is visualized one by one. Mortar Mayhem can be reduced to solely executing commands. In this case, the command sequence is always available as vector observation (one-hot encoded) and, therefore, is not visualized.

The max length of an episode can be calculated as follows:

max episode length = (command_show_duration + command_show_delay) * command_count + (explosion_delay + explosion_duration) * command_count - 2

To extend the core concept of Mortar Mayhem to Endless Mortar Mayhem, we introduce an ever-growing command sequence. The phases of displaying and executing commands are alternated. Only one command is shown before command execution, while the agent must execute all previously displayed commands in the underlying episode. To accommodate a potentially infinite command sequence, the arena undergoes a screen wrap, behaving like a torus.

Agent Observation	Ground Truth

Mystery Path procedurally generates an invisible path for the agent to cross from the origin to the goal. Per default, only the origin of the path is visible. Upon falling off the path, the agent has to restart from the origin. Note that the episode is not terminated by falling off. Hence, the agent has to memorize where it fell off and where it did not.

In Endless Mystery Path, a never-ending path is generated by exploiting the path generation of Mystery Path, which concatenates path segments. The terminal conditions of an episode need to be varied to accommodate the design of short episodes without making progress. The episode terminates if the agent fails to make progress within a few steps. Termination also occurs if the agent falls off before reaching its farthest progress, and the agent cannot fall off at the same location twice.

Agent Observation	Ground Truth

Searing Spotlights is a pitch black surrounding to the agent. The environment is initially fully observable but the light is dimmed untill off during the first few frames. Only randomly moving spotlights unveil information on the environment's ground truth, while posing a threat to the agent. If spotted by spotlight, the agent looses health points. While the agent must avoid closing in spotlights, it further has to collect coins. After collecting all coins, the agent has to take the environment's exit.

Endless Searing Spotlights solely revolves around a coin collection task, with no consideration of an exit task leading to episode termination. Upon collecting the only coin present, a new one is immediately spawned. The agent operates under a limited time budget to collect the newly spawned coin.

Baseline results are avaible via these repositories.

Recurrence + PPO

TransformerXL + PPO

v1.0.0

Improvements

• All environment concepts are extrapolated to endless episodes!
  • Endless Mortar Mayhem
  • Endless Mystery Path
  • Endless Searing Spotlights
• Improved simulation speed by using already rotated sprites and not rotating the character's surface every frame
• Mystery Path: A* obstacle walls are also placed now on the environments boundary to mitigate trivial paths
• All endless environments feature a ground truth space. As specified by this space ground truth information is added to the info dictionary
• Searing Spotlights may also visualize whether a positive reward was signaled on the previous frame

Breaking Changes

• Refactored the info key "exit_success" in Searing Spotlights to "success"

Bug Fixes

• Fixed the speed of character controller, because moving downwards was slower than moving upwards due to float truncation