Unity ML-Agents Toolkit v0.6 gets two updates: improved usability of Brains and workflow for Imitation Learning

Unity ML-agents toolkit v0.6 is getting two major enhancements, announced the Unity team in a blog post on Monday. The first update turns Brains from MonoBehaviors to ScriptableObjects improving their usability. The second update allows developers to record expert demonstrations and use them for offline training, providing a better user workflow for Imitation Learning.

Brains are now ScriptableObjects

Brains were GameObjects that were attached as children to the Academy GameObject in previous versions of ML-Agents Toolkit. This made it difficult to re-use Brains across Unity scenes within the same project. In the v0.6 release, Brains are Scriptable objects, making them manageable as standard Unity assets. This makes it easy to use them across scenes and to create Agents’ Prefabs with Brains pre-attached.

The Unity team has come up with the Learning Brain Scriptable Object that replaces the previous Internal and External Brains. It has also introduced Player and Heuristic Brain Scriptable Objects to replace the Player and Heuristic Brain Types, respectively.

Developers can no longer change the type of Brain with the Brain Type drop down and need to create a different Brain for Player and Learning from the Assets menu.

The BroadcastHub in the Academy Component can keep a track of which Brains are being trained.

Record expert demonstrations for offline training

The Demonstration Recorder allows users to record the actions and observations of an Agent while playing a game. These recordings can be used to train Agents at a later time via Imitation Learning or to analyze the data. Basically, Demonstration recorder helps training data for multiple training sessions, rather than capturing it every time. Users can add the Demonstration Recorder component to their Agent, check Record and give the demonstration a name. To train an Agent with the recording, users can modify the Hyperparameters in the training configuration. Check out the documentation on Github for more information.

Read more about the new enhancements on Unity Blog.

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