GriddlyJS: A Web IDE for Reinforcement Learning

Christopher Bamford, Minqi Jiang, Mikayel Samvelyan, Tim Rocktäschel

Keywords: environment design, tooling, developer tools, reinforcement learning, procedural content generation, integrated development environment, human in the loop.

TL;DR: An integrated development environment for reinforcement learning that streamlines the development, debugging, and agent evaluation for procedurally-generated environments

Abstract: Progress in reinforcement learning (RL) research is often driven by the design of new, challenging environments---a costly undertaking requiring skills orthogonal to that of a typical machine learning researcher. The complexity of environment development has only increased with the rise of procedural-content generation (PCG) as the prevailing paradigm for producing varied environments capable of testing the robustness and generalization of RL agents. Moreover, existing environments often require complex build processes, making reproducing results difficult. To address these issues, we introduce GriddlyJS, a web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the Griddly engine. GriddlyJS allows researchers to easily design and debug arbitrary, complex PCG grid-world environments, as well as visualize, evaluate, and record the performance of trained agent models. By connecting the RL workflow to the advanced functionality enabled by modern web standards, GriddlyJS allows publishing interactive agent-environment demos that reproduce experimental results directly to the web. To demonstrate the versatility of GriddlyJS, we use it to quickly develop a complex compositional puzzle-solving environment alongside arbitrary human-designed environment configurations and their solutions for use in a automatic curriculum learning and offline RL context. The GriddlyJS IDE is open source and freely available at https://griddly.ai.

Author Statement: Yes

URL: http://griddly.ai

License: MIT License

Contribution Process Agreement: Yes

In Person Attendance: Yes

Community Implementations: [ 5 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2207.06105/code)