Status: early beta.

seals, the Suite of Environments for Algorithms that Learn Specifications, is a toolkit for evaluating specification learning algorithms, such as reward or imitation learning. The environments are compatible with Gym, but are designed to test algorithms that learn from user data, without requiring a procedurally specified reward function.

There are two types of environments in seals:

• Diagnostic Tasks which test individual facets of algorithm performance in isolation.
• Renovated Environments, adaptations of widely-used benchmarks such as MuJoCo continuous control tasks and Atari games to be suitable for specification learning benchmarks. In particular, we remove any side-channel sources of reward information from MuJoCo tasks, and give Atari games constant-length episodes (although most Atari environments have observations that include the score).

seals is under active development and we intend to add more categories of tasks soon.

You may also be interested in our sister project imitation, providing implementations of a variety of imitation and reward learning algorithms.

Check out our documentation for more information about seals.

Quickstart

To install the latest release from PyPI, run:

pip install seals

All seals environments are available in the Gym registry. Simply import it and then use as you would with your usual RL or specification learning algroithm:

import gymnasium as gym
import seals

env = gym.make('seals/CartPole-v0')

We make releases periodically, but if you wish to use the latest version of the code, you can install directly from Git master:

pip install git+https://github.com/HumanCompatibleAI/seals.git

Contributing

For development, clone the source code and create a virtual environment for this project:

git clone git@github.com:HumanCompatibleAI/seals.git
cd seals
./ci/build_venv.sh
pip install -e .[dev]  # install extra tools useful for development

Code style

We follow a PEP8 code style with line length 88, and typically follow the Google Code Style Guide, but defer to PEP8 where they conflict. We use the black autoformatter to avoid arguing over formatting. Docstrings follow the Google docstring convention defined here, with an extensive example in the Sphinx docs.

All PRs must pass linting via the ci/code_checks.sh script. It is convenient to install this as a commit hook:

ln -s ../../ci/code_checks.sh .git/hooks/pre-commit

Tests

We use pytest for unit tests and codecov for code coverage. We also use pytype and mypy for type checking.

Workflow

Trivial changes (e.g. typo fixes) may be made directly by maintainers. Any non-trivial changes must be proposed in a PR and approved by at least one maintainer. PRs must pass the continuous integration tests (CircleCI linting, type checking, unit tests and CodeCov) to be merged.

It is often helpful to open an issue before proposing a PR, to allow for discussion of the design before coding commences.

Citing seals

To cite this project in publications:

 @misc{seals,
   author = {Adam Gleave and Pedro Freire and Steven Wang and Sam Toyer},
   title = {{seals}: Suite of Environments for Algorithms that Learn Specifications},
   year = {2020},
   publisher = {GitHub},
   journal = {GitHub repository},
   howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/HumanCompatibleAI/seals}},
}