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Fix a bug of unintentionally using same process indices #455

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Merged
merged 2 commits into from
May 9, 2019

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muupan
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@muupan muupan commented May 8, 2019

I noticed some of batch training examples have a bug that unintentionally uses same process indices (thus same random seeds!) across env processes. This PR fixes the bug.

You can see the current and new behaviors by running the code below.

import functools
import chainerrl
import gym

num_envs = 4


def make_env(process_idx, test):
    print(process_idx, test)
    return gym.make('Pendulum-v0')


def make_batch_env_old(test):
    return chainerrl.envs.MultiprocessVectorEnv(
        [(lambda: make_env(idx, test))
         for idx, env in enumerate(range(num_envs))])


def make_batch_env_new(test):
    return chainerrl.envs.MultiprocessVectorEnv(
        [functools.partial(make_env, idx, test)
         for idx, env in enumerate(range(num_envs))])


print('make_batch_env_old')
make_batch_env_old(test=False)
make_batch_env_old(test=True)

print('make_batch_env_new')
make_batch_env_new(test=False)
make_batch_env_new(test=True)

This code will outputs:

make_batch_env_old
3 False
3 False
3 False
3 False
3 True
3 True
3 True
3 True
make_batch_env_new
0 False
1 False
2 False
3 False
0 True
1 True
2 True
3 True

Even when same random seeds are used in env processes, actions sent by the agent are usually different due to the stochasticity of policy or eplorer, so this may not result in noticeable difference in learning results, but this is definitely a bug that needs to be fixed.

@muupan muupan added the bug label May 8, 2019
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@toslunar toslunar left a comment

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LGTM

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@toslunar toslunar left a comment

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Could you fix tests with the same kind of bugs?

# Wrap by FrameStack and MultiprocessVectorEnv
fs_env = chainerrl.envs.MultiprocessVectorEnv(
[(lambda: FrameStack(
make_env(idx), k=self.k, channel_order='chw'))
for idx, env in enumerate(range(self.num_envs))])
# Wrap by MultiprocessVectorEnv and VectorFrameStack
vfs_env = VectorFrameStack(
chainerrl.envs.MultiprocessVectorEnv(
[(lambda: make_env(idx))
for idx, env in enumerate(range(self.num_envs))]),
k=self.k, stack_axis=0)

@muupan
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muupan commented May 9, 2019

Thanks for the review. I fixed tests/wrappers_tests/test_vector_frame_stack.py as well.

@toslunar toslunar merged commit 940ae01 into chainer:master May 9, 2019
@muupan muupan deleted the fix-same-process-idx branch May 9, 2019 04:06
@muupan muupan added this to the v0.7 milestone Jun 28, 2019
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2 participants