RLlib Reference Results

Benchmarks of RLlib algorithms against published results. These benchmarks are a work in progress. For other results to compare against, see yarlp and more plots from OpenAI.

Ape-X Distributed Prioritized Experience Replay

rllib train -f atari-apex/atari-apex.yaml

Comparison of RLlib Ape-X to Async DQN after 10M time-steps (40M frames). Results compared to learning curves from Mnih et al, 2016 extracted at 10M time-steps from Figure 3.

env	RLlib Ape-X 8-workers	Mnih et al Async DQN 16-workers	Mnih et al DQN 1-worker
BeamRider	6134	~6000	~3000
Breakout	123	~50	~10
QBert	15302	~1200	~500
SpaceInvaders	686	~600	~500

Here we use only eight workers per environment in order to run all experiments concurrently on a single g3.16xl machine. Further speedups may be obtained by using more workers. Comparing wall-time performance after 1 hour of training:

env	RLlib Ape-X 8-workers	Mnih et al Async DQN 16-workers	Mnih et al DQN 1-worker
BeamRider	4873	~1000	~300
Breakout	77	~10	~1
QBert	4083	~500	~150
SpaceInvaders	646	~300	~160

Ape-X plots:

IMPALA and A2C

rllib train -f atari-impala/atari-impala.yaml

rllib train -f atari-a2c/atari-a2c.yaml

RLlib IMPALA and A2C on 10M time-steps (40M frames). Results compared to learning curves from Mnih et al, 2016 extracted at 10M time-steps from Figure 3.

env	RLlib IMPALA 32-workers	RLlib A2C 5-workers	Mnih et al A3C 16-workers
BeamRider	2071	1401	~3000
Breakout	385	374	~150
QBert	4068	3620	~1000
SpaceInvaders	719	692	~600

IMPALA and A2C vs A3C after 1 hour of training:

env	RLlib IMPALA 32-workers	RLlib A2C 5-workers	Mnih et al A3C 16-workers
BeamRider	3181	874	~1000
Breakout	538	268	~10
QBert	10850	1212	~500
SpaceInvaders	843	518	~300

IMPALA plots:

A2C plots:

Pong in 3 minutes

With a bit of tuning, RLlib IMPALA can solve Pong in ~3 minutes:

rllib train -f pong-speedrun/pong-impala-fast.yaml

DQN / Rainbow

rllib train -f atari-dqn/basic-dqn.yaml rllib train -f atari-dqn/duel-ddqn.yaml rllib train -f atari-dqn/dist-dqn.yaml

RLlib DQN after 10M time-steps (40M frames). Note that RLlib evaluation scores include the 1% random actions of epsilon-greedy exploration. You can expect slightly higher rewards when rolling out the policies without any exploration at all.

env	RLlib Basic DQN	RLlib Dueling DDQN	RLlib Distributional DQN	Hessel et al. DQN	Hessel et al. Rainbow
BeamRider	2869	1910	4447	~2000	~13000
Breakout	287	312	410	~150	~300
QBert	3921	7968	15780	~4000	~20000
SpaceInvaders	650	1001	1025	~500	~2000

Basic DQN plots:

Dueling DDQN plots:

Distributional DQN plots:

Proximal Policy Optimization

rllib train -f atari-ppo/atari-ppo.yaml

rllib train -f halfcheetah-ppo/halfcheetah-ppo.yaml

RLlib PPO with 10 workers after 10M and 25M time-steps (40M/100M frames). Note that RLlib does not use clip parameter annealing.

env	RLlib PPO @10M	RLlib PPO @25M	Baselines PPO @10M
BeamRider	2807	4480	~1800
Breakout	104	201	~250
QBert	11085	14247	~14000
SpaceInvaders	671	944	~800

RLlib PPO wall-time performance vs other implementations using a single Titan XP and the same number of CPUs. Results compared to learning curves from Fan et al, 2018 extracted at 1 hour of training from Figure 7. Here we get optimal results with a vectorization of 32 environment instances per worker:

env	RLlib PPO 16-workers	Fan et al PPO 16-workers	TF BatchPPO 16-workers
HalfCheetah	9664	~7700	~3200