Readme: Illuminating Diverse Neural Cellular Automata for Level Generation

This is the codebase used to generate the results presented in the paper available on arxiv. It builds on the codebase for PCGRL, whose readme is included below for reference.

To generate the results presented in the maze domain, in Table 1 of the paper, run python evo_batch.py on a SLURM cluster, or python evo_batch.py --local on a local machine. This will launch a series of experiments (either on separate nodes of a cluster or in sequence on a local machine). If you're on a SLURM cluster, you'll need to replace my email with your own, in evo_train.sh and evo_eval.sh.

The evo_batch.py file essentially repeatedly calls python evolve.py with particular sets of hyperparameters, so you may also want to experiment with calling that file directly---just be sure to take a look at all the arguments (visible with python evolve.py -h or in evo_args.py that can be provided (and note that in the paper, we always provide the flag --fix_elites since the re-evaluation of elites during training was found to mostly have a negative effect on the final archive). Results will be saved in the evo_runs directory, every --save_interval-many generations. Adding the --render option when calling evo_batch.py or evolve.py will render the level-generation process in real-time, during either training or evaluation. The former can be useful for debugging, or to get an intuitive sense of what the system is doing, but note that it will slow training down quite drastically.

To evaluate saved archives, run python evo_batch.py --evaluate (which essentially calls python evolve.py --infer --evaluate). To visualize the results of cross-evaluation in a table, run python evo_batch.py --local --cross_eval --tex (running without --tex will generate a large html with all results instead a of a tex file with only a focused subset of results). The table-generation is automated in evo_cross_eval.py. To render gifs from the level frames that were saved during evaluation, run python evo_batch.py --local --gifs.

Installation

Clone this repository along with its submodules:

git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/smearle/control-pcgrl

It is recommended to use a virtual environment using anaconda or similar. We use python 3.8.

conda create -n pcgrl python=3.7
conda activate pcgrl

To install the required python packages, it should suffice to run

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

If the above causes errors, the offending lines can be commented out, and any missing packages installed manually. GTK and PyGObject are required for rendering controllable PCGRL agents, but are not used in the above pipeline for training diverse generators. If you encounter errors relating to these packages while attempting to run the above pipeline, they can be installed with:

conda install -c conda-forge pygobject gtk3

Readme: Learning Controllable Content Generators

This repo also contains the code for the paper presented at CoG 2021.

This code requires pygobject and gtk3 (installation described above), and stable-baselines 2 and tensorflow 1 (installation described below).

To train, visualize, and evaluate a controllable generator, run train_ctrl.py, infer_ctrl.py and evaluate_ctrl.py, respectively.

Readme: PCGRL

PCGRL OpenAI GYM Interface

Current Framework Version: 0.4.0

An OpenAI GYM environment for Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning (PCGRL).

The framework, along with some initial reinforcement learning results, is covered in the paper PCGRL: Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning. This paper should be cited if code from this project is used in any way:

@misc{khalifa2020pcgrl,
    title={PCGRL: Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning},
    author={Ahmed Khalifa and Philip Bontrager and Sam Earle and Julian Togelius},
    year={2020},
    eprint={2001.09212},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.LG}
}

Installation

1. Clone this repo to your local machine.
2. To install the package, run pip install -e . from inside the repo folder. (Don't worry it will install OpenAI GYM environment automatically, otherwise you can install it first by following that link)
3. If everything went fine, the PCGRL gym interface is ready to be used. Check the following section on how to use it.

Usage

The PCGRL GYM interface has multiple different environments, where each environment consists of two parts: a problem and a representation. All the environments follow the following name conventions:

[problem_name]-[representation_name]-[version]

For the full list of supported problems names check the Supported Problems section and for the full list of the supported representations name check the Supported Representations section.

To list all the registered environments, you can run the following code:

from gym import envs
import gym_pcgrl

[env.id for env in envs.registry.all() if "gym_pcgrl" in env.entry_point]

After installing the interface, you can use it like any other GYM interface. Here is a simple example on how to use the framework on the Sokoban environment with Narrow representation:

import gym
import gym_pcgrl

env = gym.make('sokoban-narrow-v0')
obs = env.reset()
for t in range(1000):
  action = env.action_space.sample()
  obs, reward, done, info = env.step(action)
  env.render('human')
  if done:
    print("Episode finished after {} timesteps".format(t+1))
    break

Beside the OpenAI GYM traditional functions. Our interface supports additional functionalities such as:

• self.get_num_tiles(): This function get the number of different tiles that can appear in the observation space
• get_border_tile(): This function get the tile index to be used for padding a certain problem. It is used by certain wrappers.
• adjust_param(**kwargs): This function that helps adjust the problem and/or representation parameters such as modifying width and height of the generated map.

Supported Problems

Problems are the current games that we want to apply PCGRL towards them. The following table lists all the supported problems in the interface:

Supported Representations

Representations are the way the Procedural Content Generation problem is formatted as a Markov Decision Process to be able to use it for reinforcement learning. All the problems can be represented using any of the supported representations. The following table shows all the supported representations in the interface:

The narrow, wide, and turtle representation are adapted from Tree Search vs Optimization Approaches for Map Generation work by Bhaumik et al.

Create your own problem

Create the new problem class in the gym_pcgrl.envs.probs and extends Problem class from gym_pcgrl.envs.probs.problem. This class has to implement the following functions.

def __init__(self):
  super().__init__()
  ...

def get_tile_types(self):
  ...

def get_stats(self, map):
  ...

def get_reward(self, new_stats, old_stats):
  ...

def get_episode_over(self, new_stats, old_stats):
  ...

def get_debug_info(self, new_stats, old_stats):
  ...

Also, you need to make sure that you setup the following parameters in the constructor:

• self._width: the generated map width.
• self._height: the generated map height.
• self._prob: a dictionary for all the game tiles where keys are the tile names and the values are the probability of the tile appearing when initializing a random map.
• self._border_size: the size of the border added around the generated level (in a lot of games there might be a border surrounding the level, it is a good idea to get that out).
• self._border_tile: the tile name used for the border.
• self._tile_size: the size of the tile in pixels to be used in rendering.
• self._graphics: a dictionary for all the game graphics where keys are the tile names and values are the Pillow images for rendering the problem.

Feel free to override any other function if you need a behavior different from the normal behavior. For example: In all our problems, we want our system to not load the graphics unless it is going to render it. We override render() function so we can initialize self._graphics at the beginning of the render() instead of the constructor.

After implementing your own class, you need to add the name and the class in gym_pcgrl.envs.probs.PROBLEMS dictionary that can be found in __init__.py the key name is used as the problem name for the environment and the value is to refer to the main class that it need to construct for that problem.

Create your own representation

Create the new representation class in the gym_pcgrl.envs.reps and extends Representation class from gym_pcgrl.envs.reps.representation. This class has to implement the following functions.

def __init__(self, width, height, prob):
  super().__init__(width, height, prob)
  ...

def get_action_space(self):
  ...

def get_observation_space(self):
  ...

def get_observation(self):
  ...

def update(self, action):
  ...
  # boolean to define where the change happened and x,y for the location of change if it happened
  return change, x, y

Feel free to override any other function if you need a behavior different from the normal behavior. For example: in the narrow representation, we wanted to show the location where the agent should change on the rendered image. We override the render() function to draw a red square around the correct tile.

After implementing your own class, you need to add the name and the class in gym_pcgrl.envs.reps.REPRESENTATIONS dictionary that can be found in __init__.py the key name is used as the representation name for the environment and the value is to refer to the main class that it need to construct for that representation.

Running train.py

train.py uses stable baseline PPO2 algorithm for training. You can configure train.py to train for different problems or different representation by changing the game and representation parameters in the file to a different problem and/or representation.

To read more about the experiments and the different wrappers, check our paper PCGRL: Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning.

You can run the code either using the Dockerfile using the following command line after installing Docker:

docker image build -t pcgrl:latest . && docker run --runtime=nvidia pcgrl:latest

Another way is to use Conda by creating a virtual environment then activating it and installing all the dependencies for train.py:

conda create --name pcgrl
conda activate pcgrl
pip install tensorflow==1.15
pip install stable-baselines==2.9.0
cd gym_pcgrl
pip install -e .
cd ..
python train.py

Lastly, you can just install directly without using any virtual environment:

pip install tensorflow==1.15
pip install stable-baselines==2.9.0
cd gym_pcgrl
pip install -e .
cd ..
python train.py

PS: The training process will create a folder named runs/ where two folders will appear one for tensorboard logs and the other for the saved models. The training is always saving the best model so far and the last model.

Running Trained Model

First make sure you have all required modules (GYM PCGRL, Tensorflow, and Stable Baselines) are installed either using Docker, Conda, or Pip directly. The code to run is similar to the above code for training just change train.py to inference.py.

In the case, that you want to use jupyter notebook, please check inference.ipynb. Please, make sure to choose the correct kernel (especially if you are using Conda virtual environments) before running anything.

Here is a cool GIF when running these models:

PS: All the models for Sokoban Narrow, Sokoban Turtle, and the third model of Zelda Turtle has been saved using python 3.5 which have a different serialization method than python 3.6 and 3.7. When try to load them in python 3.6 or 3.7, you will get an unknown op code error so make sure that you are using the correct python version. We apologize for this mess and we are working on training new models using python 3.7 to replace these ones. Remember if you get unknown opcode, it is because of the serialization method. We didn't know about that issue until later, sorry again for any inconvenience. One last note, Python 3.6 can't load Binary Narrow and Zelda Narrow so make sure to use python 3.7 for all the models except the one that needs python 3.5.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/amidos2006/gym-pcgrl.

License

This code is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.