Acme: a research framework for reinforcement learning

Acme is a library of reinforcement learning (RL) building blocks that strives to expose simple, efficient, and readable agents. These agents first and foremost serve both as reference implementations as well as providing strong baselines for algorithm performance. However, the baseline agents exposed by Acme should also provide enough flexibility and simplicity that they can be used as a starting block for novel research. Finally, the building blocks of Acme are designed in such a way that the agents can be written at multiple scales (e.g. single-stream vs. distributed agents).

Getting started

The quickest way to get started is to take a look at the detailed working code examples found in the examples subdirectory. These show how to instantiate a number of different agents and run them within a variety of environments. See the quickstart notebook for an even quicker dive into using a single agent. Even more detail on the internal construction of an agent can be found inside our tutorial notebook. Finally, a full description Acme and its underlying components can be found by referring to the documentation. More background information and details behind the design decisions can be found in our technical report.

NOTE: Acme is first and foremost a framework for RL research written by researchers, for researchers. We use it for our own work on a daily basis. So with that in mind, while we will make every attempt to keep everything in good working order, things may break occasionally. But if so we will make our best effort to fix them as quickly as possible!

Installation

We have tested Acme on Python 3.7, 3.8 and 3.9. To get up and running quickly just follow the steps below:

1. While you can install Acme in your standard python environment, we strongly recommend using a Python virtual environment to manage your dependencies. This should help to avoid version conflicts and just generally make the installation process easier.

   python3 -m venv acme
   source acme/bin/activate
   pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

2. While the core dm-acme library can be installed directly, the set of dependencies included for installation is minimal. In particular, to run any of the included agents you will also need either JAX or TensorFlow depending on the agent. As a result we recommend installing these components as well, i.e.

   pip install dm-acme[jax,tensorflow]

3. Additionally, in order to support distributed agents Acme relies on Launchpad which can be installed with

   pip install dm-acme[launchpad]

   See here for an example of an agent using launchpad.

4. Finally, to install a few example environments (including gym, dm_control, and bsuite):

   pip install dm-acme[envs]

5. Installing from github: if you're interested in running the bleeding-edge version of Acme, you can do so by cloning the Acme GitHub repository and then executing following command from the main directory (where setup.py is located):

   pip install .[jax,tf,launchpad,testing,envs]

Citing Acme

If you use Acme in your work, please cite the accompanying technical report:

@article{hoffman2020acme,
    title={Acme: A Research Framework for Distributed Reinforcement Learning},
    author={Matt Hoffman and Bobak Shahriari and John Aslanides and Gabriel
        Barth-Maron and Feryal Behbahani and Tamara Norman and Abbas Abdolmaleki
        and Albin Cassirer and Fan Yang and Kate Baumli and Sarah Henderson and
        Alex Novikov and Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo and Serkan Cabi and Caglar
        Gulcehre and Tom Le Paine and Andrew Cowie and Ziyu Wang and Bilal Piot
        and Nando de Freitas},
    year={2020},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.00979},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.00979},
}