Behavioral cloning with PyTorch

We present here how to perform behavioral cloning on a Minari dataset using PyTorch. We will start generating the dataset of the expert policy for the CartPole-v1 environment, which is a classic control problem. The objective is to balance the pole on the cart, and we receive a reward of +1 for each successful timestep.

Imports

For this tutorial you will need the RL Baselines3 Zoo library, which you can install with pip install rl_zoo3. Let’s then import all the required packages and set the random seed for reproducibility:

import os
import sys

import gymnasium as gym
import numpy as np
import torch
import torch.nn as nn
import torch.nn.functional as F
from gymnasium import spaces
from rl_zoo3.train import train
from stable_baselines3 import PPO
from torch.utils.data import DataLoader
from tqdm.auto import tqdm

import minari
from minari import DataCollector


torch.manual_seed(42)

Policy training

Now we can train the expert policy using RL Baselines3 Zoo. We train a PPO agent on the environment:

sys.argv = ["python", "--algo", "ppo", "--env", "CartPole-v1"]
train()

This will generate a new folder named log with the expert policy.

Dataset generation

Now let’s generate the dataset using the DataCollector wrapper:

env = DataCollector(gym.make('CartPole-v1'))
path = os.path.abspath('') + '/logs/ppo/CartPole-v1_1/best_model'
agent = PPO.load(path)

total_episodes = 1_000
for i in tqdm(range(total_episodes)):
    obs, _ = env.reset(seed=42)
    while True:
        action, _ = agent.predict(obs)
        obs, rew, terminated, truncated, info = env.step(action)

        if terminated or truncated:
            break

dataset = env.create_dataset(
    dataset_id="CartPole-v1-expert",
    algorithm_name="ExpertPolicy",
    code_permalink="https://minari.farama.org/tutorials/behavioral_cloning",
    author="Farama",
    author_email="contact@farama.org"
)

Once executing the script, the dataset will be saved on your disk. You can display the list of datasets with minari list local command.

Behavioral cloning with PyTorch

Now we can use PyTorch to learn the policy from the offline dataset. Let’s define the policy network:

class PolicyNetwork(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, input_dim, output_dim):
        super().__init__()
        self.fc1 = nn.Linear(input_dim, 256)
        self.fc2 = nn.Linear(256, 128)
        self.fc3 = nn.Linear(128, output_dim)

    def forward(self, x):
        x = torch.relu(self.fc1(x))
        x = torch.relu(self.fc2(x))
        x = self.fc3(x)
        return x

In this scenario, the output dimension will be two, as previously mentioned. As for the input dimension, it will be four, corresponding to the observation space of CartPole-v1. Our next step is to load the dataset and set up the training loop. The MinariDataset is compatible with the PyTorch Dataset API, allowing us to load it directly using PyTorch DataLoader. However, since each episode can have a varying length, we need to pad them. To achieve this, we can utilize the collate_fn feature of PyTorch DataLoader. Let’s create the collate_fn function:

def collate_fn(batch):
    return {
        "id": torch.Tensor([x.id for x in batch]),
        "seed": torch.Tensor([x.seed for x in batch]),
        "total_timesteps": torch.Tensor([x.total_timesteps for x in batch]),
        "observations": torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(
            [torch.as_tensor(x.observations) for x in batch],
            batch_first=True
        ),
        "actions": torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(
            [torch.as_tensor(x.actions) for x in batch],
            batch_first=True
        ),
        "rewards": torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(
            [torch.as_tensor(x.rewards) for x in batch],
            batch_first=True
        ),
        "terminations": torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(
            [torch.as_tensor(x.terminations) for x in batch],
            batch_first=True
        ),
        "truncations": torch.nn.utils.rnn.pad_sequence(
            [torch.as_tensor(x.truncations) for x in batch],
            batch_first=True
        )
    }

We can now proceed to load the data and create the training loop. To begin, let’s initialize the DataLoader, neural network, optimizer, and loss.

minari_dataset = minari.load_dataset("CartPole-v1-expert")
dataloader = DataLoader(minari_dataset, batch_size=256, shuffle=True, collate_fn=collate_fn)

env = minari_dataset.recover_environment()
observation_space = env.observation_space
action_space = env.action_space
assert isinstance(observation_space, spaces.Box)
assert isinstance(action_space, spaces.Discrete)

policy_net = PolicyNetwork(np.prod(observation_space.shape), action_space.n)
optimizer = torch.optim.Adam(policy_net.parameters())
loss_fn = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()

We use the cross-entropy loss like a classic classification task, as the action space is discrete. We then train the policy to predict the actions:

num_epochs = 32

for epoch in range(num_epochs):
    for batch in dataloader:
        a_pred = policy_net(batch['observations'][:, :-1])
        a_hat = F.one_hot(batch["actions"]).type(torch.float32)
        loss = loss_fn(a_pred, a_hat)

        optimizer.zero_grad()
        loss.backward()
        optimizer.step()

    print(f"Epoch: {epoch}/{num_epochs}, Loss: {loss.item()}")

And now, we can evaluate if the policy learned from the expert!

env = gym.make("CartPole-v1", render_mode="human")
obs, _ = env.reset(seed=42)
done = False
accumulated_rew = 0
while not done:
    action = policy_net(torch.Tensor(obs)).argmax()
    obs, rew, ter, tru, _ = env.step(action.numpy())
    done = ter or tru
    accumulated_rew += rew

env.close()
print("Accumulated rew: ", accumulated_rew)

We can visually observe that the learned policy aces this simple control task, and we get the maximum reward 500, as the episode is truncated after 500 steps.