ML-Agents provides support for running your own python implementations of specific interfaces during the training process. These interfaces are currently fairly limited, but will be expanded in the future.
Note: Plugin interfaces should currently be considered "in beta", and they may change in future releases.
This video explains the basics of how to create a plugin system using setuptools, and is the same approach that ML-Agents' plugin system is based on.
The ml-agents-plugin-examples
directory contains a reference implementation of each plugin interface, so it's a good
starting point.
If you don't already have a setup.py
file for your python code, you'll need to add one. ml-agents-plugin-examples
has a minimal example of this.
In the call to setup()
, you'll need to add to the entry_points
dictionary for each plugin interface that you
implement. The form of this is {entry point name}={plugin module}:{plugin function}
. For example, in
ml-agents-plugin-examples
:
entry_points={
ML_AGENTS_STATS_WRITER: [
"example=mlagents_plugin_examples.example_stats_writer:get_example_stats_writer"
]
}
ML_AGENTS_STATS_WRITER
(which is a string constant,mlagents.stats_writer
) is the name of the plugin interface. This must be one of the provided interfaces (see below).example
is the plugin implementation name. This can be anything.mlagents_plugin_examples.example_stats_writer
is the plugin module. This points to the module where the plugin registration function is defined.get_example_stats_writer
is the plugin registration function. This is called when runningmlagents-learn
. The arguments and expected return type for this are different for each plugin interface.
Once you've defined entry_points
in your setup.py
, you will need to run
pip install -e [path to your plugin code]
in the same python virtual environment that you have mlagents
installed.
The StatsWriter class receives various information from the training process, such as the average Agent reward in each summary period. By default, we log this information to the console and write it to TensorBoard.
The StatsWriter.write_stats()
method must be implemented in any derived classes. It takes a "category" parameter,
which typically is the behavior name of the Agents being trained, and a dictionary of StatSummary
values with
string keys. Additionally, StatsWriter.on_add_stat()
may be extended to register a callback handler for each stat
emission.
The StatsWriter
registration function takes a RunOptions
argument and returns a list of StatsWriter
s. An
example implementation is provided in mlagents_plugin_examples