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Poster
The NetHack Learning Environment
Heinrich Küttler · Nantas Nardelli · Alexander Miller · Roberta Raileanu · Marco Selvatici · Edward Grefenstette · Tim Rocktäschel

Thu Dec 10 09:00 AM -- 11:00 AM (PST) @ Poster Session 5 #1500
in Poster Session 6 »

Progress in Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms goes hand-in-hand with the development of challenging environments that test the limits of current methods. While existing RL environments are either sufficiently complex or based on fast simulation, they are rarely both. Here, we present the NetHack Learning Environment (NLE), a scalable, procedurally generated, stochastic, rich, and challenging environment for RL research based on the popular single-player terminal-based roguelike game, NetHack. We argue that NetHack is sufficiently complex to drive long-term research on problems such as exploration, planning, skill acquisition, and language-conditioned RL, while dramatically reducing the computational resources required to gather a large amount of experience. We compare NLE and its task suite to existing alternatives, and discuss why it is an ideal medium for testing the robustness and systematic generalization of RL agents. We demonstrate empirical success for early stages of the game using a distributed Deep RL baseline and Random Network Distillation exploration, alongside qualitative analysis of various agents trained in the environment. NLE is open source and available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/nle.

Author Information

Heinrich Küttler (Facebook AI Research)
Nantas Nardelli (University of Oxford)
Alexander Miller (Facebook AI Research)
Roberta Raileanu (NYU)
Marco Selvatici (Imperial College London)
Edward Grefenstette (Facebook AI Research & University College London)
Tim Rocktäschel (University College London, Facebook AI Research)

Tim is a Researcher at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) London, an Associate Professor at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), and a Scholar of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). Prior to that, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Reinforcement Learning at the University of Oxford, a Junior Research Fellow in Computer Science at Jesus College, and a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Hertford College. Tim obtained his Ph.D. from UCL under the supervision of Sebastian Riedel, and he was awarded a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Scholarship in 2013 and a Google Ph.D. Fellowship in 2017. His work focuses on reinforcement learning in open-ended environments that require intrinsically motivated agents capable of transferring commonsense, world and domain knowledge in order to systematically generalize to novel situations.

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