Training an Agent¶
This page provides a short outline of how to train an agent for a Gymnasium environment, in particular, we will use a tabular based Q-learning to solve the Blackjack v1 environment. For a full complete version of this tutorial and more training tutorials for other environments and algorithm, see this. Please read basic usage before reading this page. Before we implement any code, here is an overview of Blackjack and Q-learning.
Blackjack is one of the most popular casino card games that is also infamous for being beatable under certain conditions. This version of the game uses an infinite deck (we draw the cards with replacement), so counting cards won’t be a viable strategy in our simulated game. The observation is a tuple of the player’s current sum, the value of the dealers face-up card and a boolean value on whether the player holds a usable case. The agent can pick between two actions: stand (0) such that the player takes no more cards and hit (1) such that the player will take another player. To win, your card sum should be greater than the dealers without exceeding 21. The game ends if the player selects stand or if the card sum is greater than 21. Full documentation can be found at https://gymnasium.farama.org/environments/toy_text/blackjack.
Q-learning is a model-free off-policy learning algorithm by Watkins, 1989 for environments with discrete action spaces and was famous for being the first reinforcement learning algorithm to prove convergence to an optimal policy under certain conditions.
Executing an action¶
After receiving our first observation, we are only going to use theenv.step(action) function to interact with the environment. This function takes an action as input and executes it in the environment. Because that action changes the state of the environment, it returns four useful variables to us. These are:
next observation: This is the observation that the agent will receive after taking the action.reward: This is the reward that the agent will receive after taking the action.terminated: This is a boolean variable that indicates whether or not the environment has terminated, i.e., ended due to an internal condition.truncated: This is a boolean variable that also indicates whether the episode ended by early truncation, i.e., a time limit is reached.info: This is a dictionary that might contain additional information about the environment.
The next observation, reward, terminated and truncated variables are self-explanatory, but the info variable requires some additional explanation. This variable contains a dictionary that might have some extra information about the environment, but in the Blackjack-v1 environment you can ignore it. For example in Atari environments the info dictionary has a ale.lives key that tells us how many lives the agent has left. If the agent has 0 lives, then the episode is over.
Note that it is not a good idea to call env.render() in your training loop because rendering slows down training by a lot. Rather try to build an extra loop to evaluate and showcase the agent after training.
Building an agent¶
Let’s build a Q-learning agent to solve Blackjack! We’ll need some functions for picking an action and updating the agents action values. To ensure that the agents explores the environment, one possible solution is the epsilon-greedy strategy, where we pick a random action with the percentage epsilon and the greedy action (currently valued as the best) 1 - epsilon.
from collections import defaultdict
import gymnasium as gym
import numpy as np
class BlackjackAgent:
def __init__(
self,
env: gym.Env,
learning_rate: float,
initial_epsilon: float,
epsilon_decay: float,
final_epsilon: float,
discount_factor: float = 0.95,
):
"""Initialize a Reinforcement Learning agent with an empty dictionary
of state-action values (q_values), a learning rate and an epsilon.
Args:
env: The training environment
learning_rate: The learning rate
initial_epsilon: The initial epsilon value
epsilon_decay: The decay for epsilon
final_epsilon: The final epsilon value
discount_factor: The discount factor for computing the Q-value
"""
self.env = env
self.q_values = defaultdict(lambda: np.zeros(env.action_space.n))
self.lr = learning_rate
self.discount_factor = discount_factor
self.epsilon = initial_epsilon
self.epsilon_decay = epsilon_decay
self.final_epsilon = final_epsilon
self.training_error = []
def get_action(self, obs: tuple[int, int, bool]) -> int:
"""
Returns the best action with probability (1 - epsilon)
otherwise a random action with probability epsilon to ensure exploration.
"""
# with probability epsilon return a random action to explore the environment
if np.random.random() < self.epsilon:
return self.env.action_space.sample()
# with probability (1 - epsilon) act greedily (exploit)
else:
return int(np.argmax(self.q_values[obs]))
def update(
self,
obs: tuple[int, int, bool],
action: int,
reward: float,
terminated: bool,
next_obs: tuple[int, int, bool],
):
"""Updates the Q-value of an action."""
future_q_value = (not terminated) * np.max(self.q_values[next_obs])
temporal_difference = (
reward + self.discount_factor * future_q_value - self.q_values[obs][action]
)
self.q_values[obs][action] = (
self.q_values[obs][action] + self.lr * temporal_difference
)
self.training_error.append(temporal_difference)
def decay_epsilon(self):
self.epsilon = max(self.final_epsilon, self.epsilon - self.epsilon_decay)
Training the agent¶
To train the agent, we will let the agent play one episode (one complete game is called an episode) at a time and then update it’s Q-values after each episode. The agent will have to experience a lot of episodes to explore the environment sufficiently.
# hyperparameters
learning_rate = 0.01
n_episodes = 100_000
start_epsilon = 1.0
epsilon_decay = start_epsilon / (n_episodes / 2) # reduce the exploration over time
final_epsilon = 0.1
agent = BlackjackAgent(
learning_rate=learning_rate,
initial_epsilon=start_epsilon,
epsilon_decay=epsilon_decay,
final_epsilon=final_epsilon,
)
Info: The current hyperparameters are set to quickly train a decent agent. If you want to converge to the optimal policy, try increasing the n_episodes by 10x and lower the learning_rate (e.g. to 0.001).
from tqdm import tqdm
env = gym.make("Blackjack-v1", sab=False)
env = gym.wrappers.RecordEpisodeStatistics(env, deque_size=n_episodes)
for episode in tqdm(range(n_episodes)):
obs, info = env.reset()
done = False
# play one episode
while not done:
action = agent.get_action(obs)
next_obs, reward, terminated, truncated, info = env.step(action)
# update the agent
agent.update(obs, action, reward, terminated, next_obs)
# update if the environment is done and the current obs
done = terminated or truncated
obs = next_obs
agent.decay_epsilon()
Visualising the policy¶
Hopefully this tutorial helped you get a grip of how to interact with Gymnasium environments and sets you on a journey to solve many more RL challenges.
It is recommended that you solve this environment by yourself (project based learning is really effective!). You can apply your favorite discrete RL algorithm or give Monte Carlo ES a try (covered in Sutton & Barto <http://incompleteideas.net/book/the-book-2nd.html>_, section 5.3) - this way you can compare your results directly to the book.
Best of luck!