ml-agents/docs/Python-API.md

Python API

The ML-Agents toolkit provides a Python API for controlling the agent simulation loop of a environment or game built with Unity. This API is used by the ML-Agent training algorithms (run with mlagents-learn), but you can also write your Python programs using this API.

The key objects in the Python API include:

• UnityEnvironment — the main interface between the Unity application and your code. Use UnityEnvironment to start and control a simulation or training session.
• BrainInfo — contains all the data from agents in the simulation, such as observations and rewards.
• BrainParameters — describes the data elements in a BrainInfo object. For example, provides the array length of an observation in BrainInfo.

These classes are all defined in the python/mlagents/mlagents/envs folder of the ML-Agents SDK.

To communicate with an agent in a Unity environment from a Python program, the agent must either use an External brain or use a brain that is broadcasting (has its Broadcast property set to true). Your code is expected to return actions for agents with external brains, but can only observe broadcasting brains (the information you receive for an agent is the same in both cases). See Using the Broadcast Feature.

For a simple example of using the Python API to interact with a Unity environment, see the Basic Jupyter notebook (notebooks/getting-started.ipynb), which opens an environment, runs a few simulation steps taking random actions, and closes the environment.

Notice: Currently communication between Unity and Python takes place over an open socket without authentication. As such, please make sure that the network where training takes place is secure. This will be addressed in a future release.

Loading a Unity Environment

Python-side communication happens through UnityEnvironment which is located in python/mlagents/mlagents/envs. To load a Unity environment from a built binary file, put the file in the same directory as envs. For example, if the filename of your Unity environment is 3DBall.app, in python, run:

from mlagents.env import UnityEnvironment
env = UnityEnvironment(file_name="3DBall", worker_id=0, seed=1)

• file_name is the name of the environment binary (located in the root directory of the python project).
• worker_id indicates which port to use for communication with the environment. For use in parallel training regimes such as A3C.
• seed indicates the seed to use when generating random numbers during the training process. In environments which do not involve physics calculations, setting the seed enables reproducible experimentation by ensuring that the environment and trainers utilize the same random seed.

If you want to directly interact with the Editor, you need to use file_name=None, then press the ▶️ button in the Editor when the message "Start training by pressing the Play button in the Unity Editor" is displayed on the screen

Interacting with a Unity Environment

A BrainInfo object contains the following fields:

• visual_observations : A list of 4 dimensional numpy arrays. Matrix n of the list corresponds to the n^th observation of the brain.
• vector_observations : A two dimensional numpy array of dimension (batch size, vector observation size).
• text_observations : A list of string corresponding to the agents text observations.
• memories : A two dimensional numpy array of dimension (batch size, memory size) which corresponds to the memories sent at the previous step.
• rewards : A list as long as the number of agents using the brain containing the rewards they each obtained at the previous step.
• local_done : A list as long as the number of agents using the brain containing done flags (whether or not the agent is done).
• max_reached : A list as long as the number of agents using the brain containing true if the agents reached their max steps.
• agents : A list of the unique ids of the agents using the brain.
• previous_actions : A two dimensional numpy array of dimension (batch size, vector action size) if the vector action space is continuous and (batch size, number of branches) if the vector action space is discrete.

Once loaded, you can use your UnityEnvironment object, which referenced by a variable named env in this example, can be used in the following way:

• Print : print(str(env))
  Prints all parameters relevant to the loaded environment and the external brains.
• Reset : env.reset(train_model=True, config=None)
  Send a reset signal to the environment, and provides a dictionary mapping brain names to BrainInfo objects.
  • train_model indicates whether to run the environment in train (True) or test (False) mode.
  • config is an optional dictionary of configuration flags specific to the environment. For generic environments, config can be ignored. config is a dictionary of strings to floats where the keys are the names of the resetParameters and the values are their corresponding float values. Define the reset parameters on the Academy Inspector window in the Unity Editor.
• Step : env.step(action, memory=None, text_action=None)
  Sends a step signal to the environment using the actions. For each brain :

  • action can be one dimensional arrays or two dimensional arrays if you have multiple agents per brains.

  • memory is an optional input that can be used to send a list of floats per agents to be retrieved at the next step.

  • text_action is an optional input that be used to send a single string per agent.

    Returns a dictionary mapping brain names to BrainInfo objects.

    For example, to access the BrainInfo belonging to a brain called 'brain_name', and the BrainInfo field 'vector_observations':

    info = env.step()
    brainInfo = info['brain_name']
    observations = brainInfo.vector_observations
    

    Note that if you have more than one external brain in the environment, you must provide dictionaries from brain names to arrays for action, memory and value. For example: If you have two external brains named brain1 and brain2 each with one agent taking two continuous actions, then you can have:

    action = {'brain1':[1.0, 2.0], 'brain2':[3.0,4.0]}
    

    Returns a dictionary mapping brain names to BrainInfo objects.

• Close : env.close() Sends a shutdown signal to the environment and closes the communication socket.