NAVIX

Quickstart | Installation | Examples | Cite

What is NAVIX?

NAVIX is minigrid in JAX, ~2000x faster with Autograd and XLA support. You can see a superficial performance comparison here.

Installation

We currently support the OSs that are supported by JAX does. Please follow the JAX installation guide to install the correct version of JAX for your OS.

You might want to follow the same guide to use your faviourite accelerator (e.g. CPU, GPU, or TPU ).

Then, install navix with:

pip install navix

Examples

XLA compilation

One straightforward use case is to accelerate the computation of the environment with XLA compilation. For example, here we compile a full training run, and we vectorise the environment to run multiple environments in parallel.

You can find a superficial performance comparison with minigrid in the docs.

import jax
import navix as nx


def run(seed)
  env = nx.environments.Room(16, 16, 8)
  key = jax.random.PRNGKey(seed)
  timestep = env.reset(key)
  actions = jax.random.randint(key, (N_TIMESTEPS,), 0, 6)

  def body_fun(timestep, action):
      timestep = env.step(timestep, jnp.asarray(action))
      return timestep, ()

  return jax.lax.scan(body_fun, timestep, jnp.asarray(actions, dtype=jnp.int32))[0]

final_timestep = jax.jit(jax.vmap(run))(jax.numpy.arange(1000))

Backpropagation through the environment

Another use case it to backpropagate through the environment transition function, for example to learn a world model.

TODO(epignatelli): add example.

Cite

If you use helx please consider citing it as:

@misc{helx,
  author = {Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title = {Navix: Reinforcement Learning navigation with Autograd and XLA},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  journal = {GitHub repository},
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/epignatelli/navix}}
  }