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Basic Usage

Two Ways to Run

After the dependencies have been installed, there are two ways to run the CleanRL script under the poetry virtual environments.

  1. Using poetry run:

    poetry run python cleanrl/ppo.py \
    --seed 1 \
    --gym-id CartPole-v0 \
    --total-timesteps 50000

  2. Using poetry shell:

    1. We first activate the virtual environment by using poetry shell
    2. Then, run any desired CleanRL script

    Attention: Each step must be executed separately!

    poetry shell

    python cleanrl/ppo.py \
    --seed 1 \
    --gym-id CartPole-v0 \
    --total-timesteps 50000

Note

We recommend poetry shell workflow for development. When the shell is activeated, you should be seeing a prefix like (cleanrl-iXg02GqF-py3.9) in your shell's prompt, which is the name of the poetry's virtual environment. We will assume to run other commands (e.g. tensorboard) in the documentation within the poetry's shell.

Visualize Training Metrics

By default, the CleanRL scripts record all the training metrics via Tensorboard into the runs folder. So, after running the training script above, feel free to run

tensorboard --logdir runs

Tensorboard

Visualize the Agent's Gameplay Videos

CleanRL helps record the agent's gameplay videos with a --capture-video flag, which will save the videos in the videos/{$run_name} folder.

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python cleanrl/ppo.py \
    --seed 1 \
    --gym-id CartPole-v0 \
    --total-timesteps 50000 \
    --capture-video

videos videos2

Get Documentation

You can directly obtained the documentation by using the --help flag.

python cleanrl/ppo.py --help

usage: ppo.py [-h] [--exp-name EXP_NAME] [--gym-id GYM_ID]
              [--learning-rate LEARNING_RATE] [--seed SEED]
              [--total-timesteps TOTAL_TIMESTEPS]
              [--torch-deterministic [TORCH_DETERMINISTIC]] [--cuda [CUDA]]
              [--track [TRACK]] [--wandb-project-name WANDB_PROJECT_NAME]
              [--wandb-entity WANDB_ENTITY] [--capture-video [CAPTURE_VIDEO]]
              [--num-envs NUM_ENVS] [--num-steps NUM_STEPS]
              [--anneal-lr [ANNEAL_LR]] [--gae [GAE]] [--gamma GAMMA]
              [--gae-lambda GAE_LAMBDA] [--num-minibatches NUM_MINIBATCHES]
              [--update-epochs UPDATE_EPOCHS] [--norm-adv [NORM_ADV]]
              [--clip-coef CLIP_COEF] [--clip-vloss [CLIP_VLOSS]]
              [--ent-coef ENT_COEF] [--vf-coef VF_COEF]
              [--max-grad-norm MAX_GRAD_NORM] [--target-kl TARGET_KL]

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --exp-name EXP_NAME   the name of this experiment
  --gym-id GYM_ID       the id of the gym environment
  --learning-rate LEARNING_RATE
                        the learning rate of the optimizer
  --seed SEED           seed of the experiment
  --total-timesteps TOTAL_TIMESTEPS
                        total timesteps of the experiments
  --torch-deterministic [TORCH_DETERMINISTIC]
                        if toggled, `torch.backends.cudnn.deterministic=False`
  --cuda [CUDA]         if toggled, cuda will be enabled by default
  --track [TRACK]       if toggled, this experiment will be tracked with Weights
                        and Biases
  --wandb-project-name WANDB_PROJECT_NAME
                        the wandb's project name
  --wandb-entity WANDB_ENTITY
                        the entity (team) of wandb's project
  --capture-video [CAPTURE_VIDEO]
                        weather to capture videos of the agent performances (check
                        out `videos` folder)
  --num-envs NUM_ENVS   the number of parallel game environments
  --num-steps NUM_STEPS
                        the number of steps to run in each environment per policy
                        rollout
  --anneal-lr [ANNEAL_LR]
                        Toggle learning rate annealing for policy and value
                        networks
  --gae [GAE]           Use GAE for advantage computation
  --gamma GAMMA         the discount factor gamma
  --gae-lambda GAE_LAMBDA
                        the lambda for the general advantage estimation
  --num-minibatches NUM_MINIBATCHES
                        the number of mini-batches
  --update-epochs UPDATE_EPOCHS
                        the K epochs to update the policy
  --norm-adv [NORM_ADV]
                        Toggles advantages normalization
  --clip-coef CLIP_COEF
                        the surrogate clipping coefficient
  --clip-vloss [CLIP_VLOSS]
                        Toggles whether or not to use a clipped loss for the value
                        function, as per the paper.
  --ent-coef ENT_COEF   coefficient of the entropy
  --vf-coef VF_COEF     coefficient of the value function
  --max-grad-norm MAX_GRAD_NORM
                        the maximum norm for the gradient clipping
  --target-kl TARGET_KL
                        the target KL divergence threshold
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