rliable is an open-source Python library for reliable evaluation, even with a handful of runs, on reinforcement learning and machine learnings benchmarks.

Desideratum	Current evaluation approach	Our Recommendation
Uncertainty in aggregate performance	Point estimates: Ignore statistical uncertainty Hinder results reproducibility	Interval estimates using stratified bootstrap confidence intervals (CIs)
Performance variability across tasks and runs	Tables with task mean scores: Overwhelming beyond a few tasks Standard deviations frequently omitted Incomplete picture for multimodal and heavy-tailed distributions	Score distributions (performance profiles): Show tail distribution of scores on combined runs across tasks Allow qualitative comparisons Easily read any score percentile
Aggregate metrics for summarizing benchmark performance	Mean: Often dominated by performance on outlier tasks   Median: Statistically inefficient (requires a large number of runs to claim improvements) Poor indicator of overall performance: 0 scores on nearly half the tasks doesn't change it	Interquartile Mean (IQM) across all runs: Performance on middle 50% of combined runs Robust to outlier scores but more statistically efficient than median To show other aspects of performance gains, report Probability of improvement and Optimality gap

rliable provides support for:

• Stratified Bootstrap Confidence Intervals (CIs)
• Performance Profiles (with plotting functions)
• Aggregate metrics
  • Interquartile Mean (IQM) across all runs
  • Optimality Gap
  • Probability of Improvement

Interactive colab

We provide a colab at bit.ly/statistical_precipice_colab, which shows how to use the library with examples of published algorithms on widely used benchmarks including Atari 100k, ALE, DM Control and Procgen.

Data for individual runs on Atari 100k, ALE, DM Control and Procgen

You can access the data for individual runs using the public GCP bucket here (you might need to sign in with your gmail account to use Gcloud) : https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/rl-benchmark-data. The interactive colab above also allows you to access the data programatically.

Paper

For more details, refer to the accompanying NeurIPS 2021 paper (Outstanding Paper Award): Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice.

Installation

To install rliable, run:

pip install -U rliable

To install latest version of rliable as a package, run:

pip install git+https://github.com/google-research/rliable

To import rliable, we suggest:

from rliable import library as rly
from rliable import metrics
from rliable import plot_utils

Aggregate metrics with 95% Stratified Bootstrap CIs

IQM, Optimality Gap, Median, Mean

algorithms = ['DQN (Nature)', 'DQN (Adam)', 'C51', 'REM', 'Rainbow',
              'IQN', 'M-IQN', 'DreamerV2']
# Load ALE scores as a dictionary mapping algorithms to their human normalized
# score matrices, each of which is of size `(num_runs x num_games)`.
atari_200m_normalized_score_dict = ...
aggregate_func = lambda x: np.array([
  metrics.aggregate_median(x),
  metrics.aggregate_iqm(x),
  metrics.aggregate_mean(x),
  metrics.aggregate_optimality_gap(x)])
aggregate_scores, aggregate_score_cis = rly.get_interval_estimates(
  atari_200m_normalized_score_dict, aggregate_func, reps=50000)
fig, axes = plot_utils.plot_interval_estimates(
  aggregate_scores, aggregate_score_cis,
  metric_names=['Median', 'IQM', 'Mean', 'Optimality Gap'],
  algorithms=algorithms, xlabel='Human Normalized Score')

Probability of Improvement

# Load ProcGen scores as a dictionary containing pairs of normalized score
# matrices for pairs of algorithms we want to compare
procgen_algorithm_pairs = {.. , 'x,y': (score_x, score_y), ..}
average_probabilities, average_prob_cis = rly.get_interval_estimates(
  procgen_algorithm_pairs, metrics.probability_of_improvement, reps=2000)
plot_utils.plot_probability_of_improvement(average_probabilities, average_prob_cis)

Sample Efficiency Curve

algorithms = ['DQN (Nature)', 'DQN (Adam)', 'C51', 'REM', 'Rainbow',
              'IQN', 'M-IQN', 'DreamerV2']
# Load ALE scores as a dictionary mapping algorithms to their human normalized
# score matrices across all 200 million frames, each of which is of size
# `(num_runs x num_games x 200)` where scores are recorded every million frame.
ale_all_frames_scores_dict = ...
frames = np.array([1, 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 125, 150, 175, 200]) - 1
ale_frames_scores_dict = {algorithm: score[:, :, frames] for algorithm, score
                          in ale_all_frames_scores_dict.items()}
iqm = lambda scores: np.array([metrics.aggregate_iqm(scores[..., frame])
                               for frame in range(scores.shape[-1])])
iqm_scores, iqm_cis = rly.get_interval_estimates(
  ale_frames_scores_dict, iqm, reps=50000)
plot_utils.plot_sample_efficiency_curve(
    frames+1, iqm_scores, iqm_cis, algorithms=algorithms,
    xlabel=r'Number of Frames (in millions)',
    ylabel='IQM Human Normalized Score')

Performance Profiles

# Load ALE scores as a dictionary mapping algorithms to their human normalized
# score matrices, each of which is of size `(num_runs x num_games)`.
atari_200m_normalized_score_dict = ...
# Human normalized score thresholds
atari_200m_thresholds = np.linspace(0.0, 8.0, 81)
score_distributions, score_distributions_cis = rly.create_performance_profile(
    atari_200m_normalized_score_dict, atari_200m_thresholds)
# Plot score distributions
fig, ax = plt.subplots(ncols=1, figsize=(7, 5))
plot_utils.plot_performance_profiles(
  score_distributions, atari_200m_thresholds,
  performance_profile_cis=score_distributions_cis,
  colors=dict(zip(algorithms, sns.color_palette('colorblind'))),
  xlabel=r'Human Normalized Score $(\tau)$',
  ax=ax)

The above profile can also be plotted with non-linear scaling as follows:

plot_utils.plot_performance_profiles(
  perf_prof_atari_200m, atari_200m_tau,
  performance_profile_cis=perf_prof_atari_200m_cis,
  use_non_linear_scaling=True,
  xticks = [0.0, 0.5, 1.0, 2.0, 4.0, 8.0]
  colors=dict(zip(algorithms, sns.color_palette('colorblind'))),
  xlabel=r'Human Normalized Score $(\tau)$',
  ax=ax)

Dependencies

The code was tested under Python>=3.7 and uses these packages:

• arch == 5.3.0
• scipy >= 1.7.0
• numpy >= 0.9.0
• absl-py >= 1.16.4
• seaborn >= 0.11.2

Citing

If you find this open source release useful, please reference in your paper:

@article{agarwal2021deep,
  title={Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice},
  author={Agarwal, Rishabh and Schwarzer, Max and Castro, Pablo Samuel
          and Courville, Aaron and Bellemare, Marc G},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year={2021}
}

Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product.