README.md

symbol-grounding

An empirical demonstration of a discontinuous performance increase via learned symbol grounding

An RL agent is trained (via PPO) to avoid lava obstacles and reach a goal. The agent is then transferred to a new environment, where the location of lava obstacles are indicated by colored arrows. A supervised translator is trained to predict lava locations from arrow environmental observations. Performance is compared amoung the frozen pretrained agent with accessed to the translator, the pretrained agent trained on the new environment, and a randomly initialized agent learning the new environment from scratch.

Results

Installation

Clone symbol-grounding anywhere you like

Dependencies

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Gym Minigrid

cd gym-minigrid
pip3 install -e .

Usage

Replicate Paper

To replicate the experiment from the paper, run

python main.py

Modify training durations

To experiment with different training durations, use the --pretrain_steps and --tranfer_steps arguments:

python main.py --pretrain_steps 1000000 --transfer_steps 300000

Train individual components

To train models individually (and analyze the results) use the following scripts:

• train_lava.py
• train_arrows.py
• transfer_arrows.py
• arrow_to_lava/train_translator.py
• translate_arrow_lava.py
• plot_results.py