Unit - 1

Train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent 🤖

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Open in Colab

Open In Colab

Now that you’ve studied the bases of Reinforcement Learning, you’re ready to train your first
agent and share it with the community through the Hub 🔥
: A Lunar Lander agent that will
learn to land correctly on the Moon 🌕

🤖
Unit 1: Train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning
Agent
In this notebook, you’ll train your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent a Lunar Lander
agent that will learn to land correctly on the Moon 🌕
. Using Stable-Baselines3 a Deep
Reinforcement Learning library, share them with the community, and experiment with
different configurations

The environment 🎮
LunarLander-v2

The library used 📚

Stable-Baselines3

We’re constantly trying to improve our tutorials, so if you find some issues in this notebook,
please open an issue on the Github Repo.

Objectives of this notebook 🏆

At the end of the notebook, you will:

Be able to use Gymnasium, the environment library.

Be able to use Stable-Baselines3, the deep reinforcement learning library.
Be able to push your trained agent to the Hub with a nice video replay and an evaluation
score 🔥 .

Let’s do a small recap on what we learned in the first Unit:

Reinforcement Learning is a computational approach to learning from actions. We build

an agent that learns from the environment by interacting with it through trial and
error and receiving rewards (negative or positive) as feedback.
The goal of any RL agent is to maximize its expected cumulative reward (also called
expected return) because RL is based on the reward hypothesis, which is that all goals
can be described as the maximization of an expected cumulative reward.
The RL process is a loop that outputs a sequence of state, action, reward, and next state.
To calculate the expected cumulative reward (expected return), we discount the rewards:
the rewards that come sooner (at the beginning of the game) are more probable to
 happen since they are more predictable than the long-term future reward.
To solve an RL problem, you want to find an optimal policy; the policy is the “brain” of
your AI that will tell us what action to take given a state. The optimal one is the one that
gives you the actions that max the expected return.

There are two ways to find your optimal policy:

By training your policy directly: policy-based methods.

By training a value function that tells us the expected return the agent will get at each
state and use this function to define our policy: value-based methods.
Finally, we spoke about Deep RL because we introduce deep neural networks to estimate
the action to take (policy-based) or to estimate the value of a state (value-based) hence
the name “deep.”

🚀
Let’s train our first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent and
upload it to the Hub

Install dependencies and create a virtual screen 🔽

The first step is to install the dependencies, we’ll install multiple ones.

gymnasium[box2d] : Contains the LunarLander-v2 environment 🌛

stable-baselines3[extra] : The deep reinforcement learning library.
huggingface_sb3 : Additional code for Stable-baselines3 to load and upload models
from the Hugging Face 🤗 Hub.
To make things easier, we created a script to install all these dependencies.

apt install swig cmake

pip install -r https://raw.githubusercontent.com/huggingface/deep-rl-
class/main/notebooks/unit1/requirements-unit1.txt

During the notebook, we’ll need to generate a replay video. To do so, with colab, we need to
have a virtual screen to be able to render the environment (and thus record the frames).

Hence the following cell will install virtual screen libraries and create and run a virtual screen
🖥 .

sudo apt-get update

apt install python-opengl
apt install ffmpeg
apt install xvfb
pip3 install pyvirtualdisplay

To make sure the new installed libraries are used, sometimes it’s required to restart the
notebook runtime. The next cell will force the runtime to crash, so you’ll need to connect again
and run the code starting from here. Thanks to this trick, we will be able to run our virtual
screen.

import os
os.kill(os.getpid(), 9)
 # Virtual display
from pyvirtualdisplay import Display

virtual_display = Display(visible=0, size=(1400, 900))

virtual_display.start()

Import the packages 📦

One additional library we import is huggingface_hub to be able to upload and download
trained models from the hub.

The Hugging Face Hub 🤗 works as a central place where anyone can share and explore
models and datasets. It has versioning, metrics, visualizations and other features that will
allow you to easily collaborate with others.

You can see here all the Deep reinforcement Learning models available here 👉
https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=reinforcement-learning&sort=downloads

import gymnasium

from huggingface_sb3 import load_from_hub, package_to_hub

from huggingface_hub import (
notebook_login,
) # To log to our Hugging Face account to be able to upload models to the
Hub.

from stable_baselines3 import PPO

from stable_baselines3.common.env_util import make_vec_env
from stable_baselines3.common.evaluation import evaluate_policy
from stable_baselines3.common.monitor import Monitor

Understand Gymnasium and how it works 🤖

🏋 The library containing our environment is called Gymnasium. You’ll use Gymnasium a lot
in Deep Reinforcement Learning.

Gymnasium is the new version of Gym library maintained by the Farama Foundation.

The Gymnasium library provides two things:

An interface that allows you to create RL environments.

A collection of environments (gym-control, atari, box2D…).

Let’s look at an example, but first let’s recall the RL loop.

 The RL process

At each step:

Our Agent receives a state (S0) from the Environment — we receive the first frame of our
game (Environment).
Based on that state (S0), the Agent takes an action (A0) — our Agent will move to the
right.
The environment transitions to a new state (S1) — new frame.
The environment gives some reward (R1) to the Agent — we’re not dead (Positive
Reward +1).

With Gymnasium:

1️⃣ We create our environment using gymnasium.make()

2️⃣ We reset the environment to its initial state with observation = env.reset()

At each step:

3️⃣ Get an action using our model (in our example we take a random action)
4️⃣ Using env.step(action) , we perform this action in the environment and get

observation : The new state (st+1)

reward : The reward we get after executing the action
terminated : Indicates if the episode terminated (agent reach the terminal state)
truncated : Introduced with this new version, it indicates a timelimit or if an agent go
out of bounds of the environment for instance.
info : A dictionary that provides additional information (depends on the environment).

For more explanations check this

👉 https://gymnasium.farama.org/api/env/#gymnasium.Env.step

If the episode is terminated:

We reset the environment to its initial state with observation = env.reset()

Let’s look at an example! Make sure to read the code:

 import gymnasium as gym

# First, we create our environment called LunarLander-v2

env = gym.make("LunarLander-v2")

# Then we reset this environment

observation, info = env.reset()

for _ in range(20):
# Take a random action
action = env.action_space.sample()
print("Action taken:", action)

# Do this action in the environment and get

# next_state, reward, terminated, truncated and info
observation, reward, terminated, truncated, info = env.step(action)

# If the game is terminated (in our case we land, crashed) or truncated

(timeout)
if terminated or truncated:
# Reset the environment
print("Environment is reset")
observation, info = env.reset()

env.close()

Create the LunarLander environment

works
🌛 and understand how it
The environment 🎮
In this first tutorial, we’re going to train our agent, a Lunar Lander, to land correctly on the
moon. To do that, the agent needs to learn to adapt its speed and position (horizontal, vertical,
and angular) to land correctly.

💡 A good habit when you start to use an environment is to check its documentation
👉 https://gymnasium.farama.org/environments/box2d/lunar_lander/
Let’s see what the Environment looks like:

# We create our environment with gym.make("<name_of_the_environment>")

env = gym.make("LunarLander-v2")
env.reset()
print("_____OBSERVATION SPACE_____ \n")
print("Observation Space Shape", env.observation_space.shape)
print("Sample observation", env.observation_space.sample()) # Get a random
observation

We see with Observation Space Shape (8,) that the observation is a vector of size 8, where
each value contains different information about the lander:

Horizontal pad coordinate (x)

Vertical pad coordinate (y)
Horizontal speed (x)
Vertical speed (y)
Angle
 Angular speed
If the left leg contact point has touched the land (boolean)
If the right leg contact point has touched the land (boolean)

print("\n _____ACTION SPACE_____ \n")

print("Action Space Shape", env.action_space.n)
print("Action Space Sample", env.action_space.sample()) # Take a random
action

The action space (the set of possible actions the agent can take) is discrete with 4 actions
available 🎮 :

Action 0: Do nothing,
Action 1: Fire left orientation engine,
Action 2: Fire the main engine,
Action 3: Fire right orientation engine.

Reward function (the function that will gives a reward at each timestep) 💰:
After every step a reward is granted. The total reward of an episode is the sum of the rewards
for all the steps within that episode.

For each step, the reward:

Is increased/decreased the closer/further the lander is to the landing pad.

Is increased/decreased the slower/faster the lander is moving.
Is decreased the more the lander is tilted (angle not horizontal).
Is increased by 10 points for each leg that is in contact with the ground.
Is decreased by 0.03 points each frame a side engine is firing.
Is decreased by 0.3 points each frame the main engine is firing.

The episode receive an additional reward of -100 or +100 points for crashing or landing safely
respectively.

An episode is considered a solution if it scores at least 200 points.

Vectorized Environment

We create a vectorized environment (a method for stacking multiple independent

environments into a single environment) of 16 environments, this way, we’ll have more
diverse experiences during the training.

# Create the environment

env = make_vec_env("LunarLander-v2", n_envs=16)

Create the Model 🤖

We have studied our environment and we understood the problem: being able to land
the Lunar Lander to the Landing Pad correctly by controlling left, right and main
orientation engine. Now let’s build the algorithm we’re going to use to solve this Problem
🚀.
To do so, we’re going to use our first Deep RL library, Stable Baselines3 (SB3).
SB3 is a set of reliable implementations of reinforcement learning algorithms in PyTorch.
💡 A good habit when using a new library is to dive first on the
documentation: https://stable-baselines3.readthedocs.io/en/master/ and then try some
tutorials.

To solve this problem, we’re going to use SB3 PPO. PPO (aka Proximal Policy Optimization) is
one of the SOTA (state of the art) Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms that you’ll study
during this course.

PPO is a combination of:

Value-based reinforcement learning method: learning an action-value function that will

tell us the most valuable action to take given a state and action.
Policy-based reinforcement learning method: learning a policy that will give us a
probability distribution over actions.

Stable-Baselines3 is easy to set up:

1️⃣ You create your environment (in our case it was done above)
2️⃣ You define the model you want to use and instantiate this model model =
PPO("MlpPolicy")

3️⃣ You train the agent with model.learn and define the number of training timesteps.

# Create environment
env = gym.make('LunarLander-v2')

# Instantiate the agent

model = PPO('MlpPolicy', env, verbose=1)
# Train the agent
model.learn(total_timesteps=int(2e5))

# TODO: Define a PPO MlpPolicy architecture

# We use MultiLayerPerceptron (MLPPolicy) because the input is a vector,
# if we had frames as input we would use CnnPolicy
model = PPO(
policy="MlpPolicy",
env=env,
n_steps=1024,
batch_size=64,
n_epochs=4,
gamma=0.999,
gae_lambda=0.98,
ent_coef=0.01,
verbose=1,
)

Train the PPO agent 🏃

Let’s train our agent for 1,000,000 timesteps, don’t forget to use GPU on Colab. It will
take approximately ~20min, but you can use fewer timesteps if you just want to try it out.
During the training, take a ☕ break you deserved it 🤗
# Train it for 1,000,000 timesteps
model.learn(total_timesteps=1000000)
# Save the model
 model_name = "ppo-LunarLander-v2"
model.save(model_name)

Evaluate the agent 📈

Remember to wrap the environment in a Monitor.
Now that our Lunar Lander agent is trained 🚀, we need to check its performance.
Stable-Baselines3 provides a method to do that: evaluate_policy .
To fill that part you need to check the documentation
In the next step, we’ll see how to automatically evaluate and share your agent to
compete in a leaderboard, but for now let’s do it ourselves

💡 When you evaluate your agent, you should not use your training environment but create
an evaluation environment.

eval_env = Monitor(gym.make("LunarLander-v2"))
mean_reward, std_reward = evaluate_policy(model, eval_env,
n_eval_episodes=10, deterministic=True)
print(f"mean_reward={mean_reward:.2f} +/- {std_reward}")

In my case, I got a mean reward is 200.20 +/- 20.80 after training for 1 million steps,
which means that our lunar lander agent is ready to land on the moon 🌛🥳.
Publish our trained model on the Hub 🔥
Now that we saw we got good results after the training, we can publish our trained model on
the hub 🤗 with one line of code.
📚 The libraries documentation
👉 https://github.com/huggingface/huggingface_sb3/tree/main#hugging-face—x-stable-
baselines3-v20

Here’s an example of a Model Card (with Space Invaders):

By using package_to_hub you evaluate, record a replay, generate a model card of your agent
and push it to the hub.

This way:

You can showcase our work 🔥

You can visualize your agent playing 👀
You can share with the community an agent that others can use 💾
You can access a leaderboard 🏆 to see how well your agent is performing compared to
your classmates 👉
https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingface-projects/Deep-
Reinforcement-Learning-Leaderboard

To be able to share your model with the community there are three more steps to follow:

1️⃣ (If it’s not already done) create an account on Hugging Face
➡ https://huggingface.co/join
2️⃣ Sign in and then, you need to store your authentication token from the Hugging Face
website.

Create a new token (https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens) with write role

 Create HF Token

Copy the token

Run the cell below and paste the token

notebook_login()
!git config --global credential.helper store

If you don’t want to use a Google Colab or a Jupyter Notebook, you need to use this command
instead: huggingface-cli login

3️⃣ We’re now ready to push our trained agent to the 🤗 Hub 🔥
using package_to_hub() function

Let’s fill the package_to_hub function:

model : our trained model.

model_name : the name of the trained model that we defined in model_save
model_architecture : the model architecture we used, in our case PPO
env_id : the name of the environment, in our case LunarLander-v2
eval_env : the evaluation environment defined in eval_env
repo_id : the name of the Hugging Face Hub Repository that will be
created/updated (repo_id = {username}/{repo_name})

💡 A good name is {username}/{model_architecture}-{env_id}

commit_message : message of the commit

import gymnasium as gym

from stable_baselines3.common.vec_env import DummyVecEnv
from stable_baselines3.common.env_util import make_vec_env

from huggingface_sb3 import package_to_hub

## TODO: Define a repo_id

## repo_id is the id of the model repository from the Hugging Face Hub
(repo_id = {organization}/{repo_name} for instance ThomasSimonini/ppo-
LunarLander-v2
repo_id = "DenCT/ppo-lunarlander-v2"

# TODO: Define the name of the environment

 env_id = "LunarLander-v2"

# Create the evaluation env and set the render_mode="rgb_array"

eval_env = DummyVecEnv([lambda: gym.make(env_id, render_mode="rgb_array")])

# TODO: Define the model architecture we used

model_architecture = "PPO"

## TODO: Define the commit message

commit_message = "Initial commit"

# method save, evaluate, generate a model card and record a replay video of
your agent before pushing the repo to the hub
package_to_hub(model=model, # Our trained model
model_name=model_name, # The name of our trained model
model_architecture=model_architecture, # The model
architecture we used: in our case PPO
env_id=env_id, # Name of the environment
eval_env=eval_env, # Evaluation Environment
repo_id=repo_id, # id of the model repository from the
Hugging Face Hub (repo_id = {organization}/{repo_name} for instance
ThomasSimonini/ppo-LunarLander-v2
commit_message=commit_message)

Congrats 🥳 you’ve just trained and uploaded your first Deep Reinforcement Learning agent.
The script above should have displayed a link to a model repository such
as https://huggingface.co/osanseviero/test_sb3. When you go to this link, you can:

See a video preview of your agent at the right.

Click “Files and versions” to see all the files in the repository.
Click “Use in stable-baselines3” to get a code snippet that shows how to load the model.
A model card ( README.md file) which gives a description of the model

Under the hood, the Hub uses git-based repositories (don’t worry if you don’t know what git
is), which means you can update the model with new versions as you experiment and improve
your agent.

Compare the results of your LunarLander-v2 with your classmates using the leaderboard 🏆
👉 https://huggingface.co/spaces/huggingface-projects/Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-
Leaderboard

Load a saved LunarLander model from the Hub 🤗

Thanks to ironbar for the contribution.
Loading a saved model from the Hub is really easy.
You go to https://huggingface.co/models?library=stable-baselines3 to see the list of all the
Stable-baselines3 saved models.

1. You select one and copy its repo_id

 Copy-id

2. Then we just need to use load_from_hub with:

The repo_id
The filename: the saved model inside the repo and its extension (*.zip)

Because the model I download from the Hub was trained with Gym (the former version of
Gymnasium) we need to install shimmy a API conversion tool that will help us to run the
environment correctly.

Shimmy Documentation: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Shimmy

!pip install shimmy

from huggingface_sb3 import load_from_hub

repo_id = "Classroom-workshop/assignment2-omar" # The repo_id

filename = "ppo-LunarLander-v2.zip" # The model filename.zip

# When the model was trained on Python 3.8 the pickle protocol is 5
# But Python 3.6, 3.7 use protocol 4
# In order to get compatibility we need to:
# 1. Install pickle5 (we done it at the beginning of the colab)
# 2. Create a custom empty object we pass as parameter to PPO.load()
custom_objects = {
"learning_rate": 0.0,
"lr_schedule": lambda _: 0.0,
"clip_range": lambda _: 0.0,
}

checkpoint = load_from_hub(repo_id, filename)

model = PPO.load(checkpoint, custom_objects=custom_objects,
print_system_info=True)

Let’s evaluate this agent:

eval_env = Monitor(gym.make("LunarLander-v2"))
mean_reward, std_reward = evaluate_policy(model, eval_env,
n_eval_episodes=10, deterministic=True)
print(f"mean_reward={mean_reward:.2f} +/- {std_reward}")

Some additional challenges 🏆

The best way to learn is to try things by your own! As you saw, the current agent is not doing
great. As a first suggestion, you can train for more steps. With 1,000,000 steps, we saw some
great results!

In the Leaderboard you will find your agents. Can you get to the top?

Here are some ideas to achieve so:

Train more steps

Try different hyperparameters for PPO . You can see them at https://stable-
baselines3.readthedocs.io/en/master/modules/ppo.html#parameters.
Check the Stable-Baselines3 documentation and try another model such as DQN.
Push your new trained model on the Hub 🔥
Compare the results of your LunarLander-v2 with your classmates using the leaderboard 🏆
Is moon landing too boring for you? Try to change the environment, why not use
MountainCar-v0, CartPole-v1 or CarRacing-v0? Check how they work using the gym
documentation and have fun 🎉.
Congrats on finishing this chapter! That was the biggest one, and there was a lot of
information.

If you’re still feel confused with all these elements…it’s totally normal! This was the same for
me and for all people who studied RL.

Take time to really grasp the material before continuing and try the additional challenges. It’s
important to master these elements and have a solid foundations.

Naturally, during the course, we’re going to dive deeper into these concepts but it’s better to
have a good understanding of them now before diving into the next chapters.

Next time, in the bonus unit 1, you’ll train Huggy the Dog to fetch the stick.

Quiz
1: What is Reinforcement Learning?

Reinforcement learning is a framework for solving control tasks (also called decision
problems) by building agents that learn from the environment by interacting with it through
trial and error and receiving rewards (positive or negative) as unique feedback.

2: Define the RL Loop

 Exercise RL Loop

At every step:

Our Agent receives state s0 from the environment

Based on that state s0 the Agent takes an action a0
Our Agent will move to the right
The Environment goes to a new state s1
The Environment gives a reward r1 to the Agent

3: What’s the difference between a state and an observation?

The state is a complete description of the state of the world (there is no hidden
information)
The observation is a partial description of the state
We receive a state when we play with chess environment
We receive an observation when we play with Super Mario Bros

4: A task is an instance of a Reinforcement Learning problem. What are the two

types of tasks?

Episodic
Continuing

5: What is the exploration/exploitation tradeoff?

In Reinforcement Learning, we need to balance how much we explore the environment and
how much we exploit what we know about the environment.

Exploration is exploring the environment by trying random actions in order to find more
information about the environment.
Exploitation is exploiting known information to maximize the reward.

6: What is a policy?

The Policy π is the brain of our Agent. It’s the function that tells us what action to take
given the state we are in. So it defines the agent’s behavior at a given time.
7: What are value-based methods?

Value-based methods is one of the main approaches for solving RL problems.

In Value-based methods, instead of training a policy function, we train a value function
that maps a state to the expected value of being at that state.

8: What are policy-based methods?

In Policy-Based Methods, we learn a policy function directly.

This policy function will map from each state to the best corresponding action at that
state. Or a probability distribution over the set of possible actions at that state.