This C++ toolbox is aimed at representing and solving common AI problems, implementing an easy-to-use interface which should be hopefully extensible to many problems, while keeping code readable.
Current development includes MDPs, POMDPs and related algorithms. This toolbox
was originally developed taking inspiration from the Matlab MDPToolbox, which
you can find here, and from the
pomdp-solve software written by A. R. Cassandra, which you can find
here.
If you are new to the field of reinforcement learning, we have a few simple tutorials that can help you get started. An excellent, more in depth introduction to the basics of reinforcement learning can be found freely online in this book.
If you use this toolbox for research, please consider citing our JMLR article:
@article{JMLR:v21:18-402,
author = {Eugenio Bargiacchi and Diederik M. Roijers and Ann Now\'{e}},
title = {AI-Toolbox: A C++ library for Reinforcement Learning and Planning (with Python Bindings)},
journal = {Journal of Machine Learning Research},
year = {2020},
volume = {21},
number = {102},
pages = {1-12},
url = {http://jmlr.org/papers/v21/18-402.html}
}
// The model can be any custom class that respects a 10-method interface.
auto model = makeTigerProblem();
unsigned horizon = 10; // The horizon of the solution.
// The 0.0 is the convergence parameter. It gives a way to stop the
// computation if the policy has converged before the horizon.
AIToolbox::POMDP::IncrementalPruning solver(horizon, 0.0);
// Solve the model and obtain the optimal value function.
auto [bound, valueFunction] = solver(model);
// We create a policy from the solution to compute the agent's actions.
// The parameters are the size of the model (SxAxO), and the value function.
AIToolbox::POMDP::Policy policy(2, 3, 2, valueFunction);
// We begin a simulation with a uniform belief. We sample from the belief
// in order to get a "real" state for the world, since this code has to
// both emulate the environment and control the agent.
AIToolbox::POMDP::Belief b(2); b << 0.5, 0.5;
auto s = AIToolbox::sampleProbability(b.size(), b, rand);
// We sample the first action. The id is to follow the policy tree later.
auto [a, id] = policy.sampleAction(b, horizon);
double totalReward = 0.0;// As an example, we store the overall reward.
for (int t = horizon - 1; t >= 0; --t) {
// We advance the world one step.
auto [s1, o, r] = model.sampleSOR(s, a);
totalReward += r;
// We select our next action from the observation we got.
std::tie(a, id) = policy.sampleAction(id, o, t);
s = s1; // Finally we update the world for the next timestep.
}The latest documentation is available here.
We have a few tutorials
that can help you get started with the toolbox. The tutorials are in C++, but
the examples folder contains equivalent Python code which you can follow
along just as well.
For Python docs you can find them by typing help(AIToolbox) from the
interpreter. It should show the exported API for each class, along with any
differences in input/output.
Cassandra's POMDP format is a type of text file that contains a definition of an MDP or POMDP model. You can find some examples here. While it is absolutely not necessary to use this format, and you can define models via code, we do parse a reasonable subset of Cassandra's POMDP format, which allows to reuse already defined problems with this library. Here's the docs on that.
The user interface of the library is pretty much the same with Python than what
you would get by using simply C++. See the examples folder to see just how
much Python and C++ code resemble each other. Since Python does not allow
templates, the classes are binded with as many instantiations as possible.
Additionally, the library allows the usage of native Python generative models (where you don't need to specify the transition and reward functions, you only sample next state and reward). This allows for example to directly use OpenAI gym environments with minimal code writing.
That said, if you need to customize a specific implementation to make it perform better on your specific use-cases, or if you want to try something completely new, you will have to use C++.
The library has an extensive set of utilities which would be too long to enumerate here. In particular, we have utilities for combinatorics, polytopes, linear programming, sampling and distributions, automated statistics, belief updating, many data structures, logging, seeding and much more.
Not in Python yet.
Not in Python yet.
To build the library you need:
- cmake >= 3.12
- the boost library >= 1.67
- the Eigen 3.4 library.
- the lp_solve library (a shared library must be available to compile the Python wrapper).
In addition, C++20 support is now required (this means at least g++-10)
On a Ubuntu system, you can install these dependencies with the following command:
sudo apt install g++-10 cmake libboost1.71-all-dev liblpsolve55-dev lp-solve libeigen3-devOnce you have all required dependencies, you can simply execute the following commands from the project's main folder:
mkdir build
cd build/
cmake ..
makecmake can be called with a series of flags in order to customize the output,
if building everything is not desirable. The following flags are available:
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE # Defines the build type
MAKE_ALL # Builds all there is to build in the project, but Python.
MAKE_LIB # Builds the whole core C++ libraries (MDP, POMDP, etc..)
MAKE_MDP # Builds only the core C++ MDP library
MAKE_FMDP # Builds only the core C++ Factored/Multi-Agent and MDP libraries
MAKE_POMDP # Builds only the core C++ POMDP and MDP libraries
MAKE_TESTS # Builds the library's tests for the compiled core libraries
MAKE_EXAMPLES # Builds the library's examples using the compiled core libraries
MAKE_PYTHON # Builds Python bindings for the compiled core libraries
AI_PYTHON_VERSION # Selects the Python version you want (2 or 3). If not
# specified, we try to guess based on your default interpreter.
AI_LOGGING_ENABLED # Whether the library logging code is enabled at runtime.These flags can be combined as needed. For example:
# Will build MDP and MDP Python 3 bindings
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DMAKE_MDP=1 -DMAKE_PYTHON=1 -DAI_PYTHON_VERSION=3 ..The default flags when nothing is specified are MAKE_ALL and
CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release.
Note that by default MAKE_ALL does not build the Python bindings, as they have
a minor performance hit on the C++ static libraries. You can easily enable them
by using the flag MAKE_PYTHON.
The static library files will be available directly in the build directory.
Three separate libraries are built: AIToolboxMDP, AIToolboxPOMDP and
AIToolboxFMDP. In case you want to link against either the POMDP library or
the Factored MDP library, you will also need to link against the MDP one, since
both of them use MDP functionality.
A number of small tests are included which you can find in the test/ folder.
You can execute them after building the project using the following command
directly from the build directory, just after you finish make:
ctestThe tests also offer a brief introduction for the framework, waiting for a more complete descriptive write-up. Only the tests for the parts of the library that you compiled are going to be built.
To compile the library's documentation you need Doxygen. To use it it is sufficient to execute the following command from the project's root folder:
doxygenAfter that the documentation will be generated into an html folder in the
main directory.
For an extensive pre-made setup of a C++/CMake project using AI-Toolbox on Linux, please do checkout this repository. It contains the setup I personally use when working with AI-Toolbox. It also comes with many additional tools you might need, which are nevertheless all optional.
Alternatively, to compile a program that uses this library, simply link it
against the compiled libraries you need, and possibly to the lp_solve
libraries (if using POMDP or FMDP).
Please note that since both POMDP and FMDP libraries rely on the MDP code, you
MUST specify those libraries before the MDP library when linking,
otherwise it may result in undefined reference errors. The POMDP and Factored
MDP libraries are not currently dependent on each other so their order does not
matter.
For Python, you just need to import the AIToolbox.so module, and you'll be
able to use the classes as exported to Python. All classes are documented, and
you can run in the Python CLI
help(AIToolbox.MDP)
help(AIToolbox.POMDP)
to see the documentation for each specific class.
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