Papers › NAVIX: Scaling MiniGrid Environments with JAX

NAVIX: Scaling MiniGrid Environments with JAX

28 Jul 2024arXiv:2407.19396archive 2025-07-28

Eduardo Pignatelli, Jarek Liesen, Robert Tjarko Lange, Chris Lu, Pablo Samuel Castro, Laura Toni

As Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) research moves towards solving large-scale worlds, efficient environment simulations become crucial for rapid experimentation. However, most existing environments struggle to scale to high throughput, setting back meaningful progress. Interactions are typically computed on the CPU, limiting training speed and throughput, due to slower computation and communication overhead when distributing the task across multiple machines. Ultimately, Deep RL training is CPU-bound, and developing batched, fast, and scalable environments has become a frontier for progress. Among the most used Reinforcement Learning (RL) environments, MiniGrid is at the foundation of several studies on exploration, curriculum learning, representation learning, diversity, meta-learning, credit assignment, and language-conditioned RL, and still suffers from the limitations described above. In this work, we introduce NAVIX, a re-implementation of MiniGrid in JAX. NAVIX achieves over 200 000x speed improvements in batch mode, supporting up to 2048 agents in parallel on a single Nvidia A100 80 GB. This reduces experiment times from one week to 15 minutes, promoting faster design iterations and more scalable RL model development.

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categorical_kl epignatelli/navix/navix/agents/models.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 0cb886a5040816ee · report
coordinates epignatelli/navix/navix/grid.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 08d7716969571f07 · report
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field epignatelli/navix/navix/components.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 78338016bc57d3e0 · report
idx_from_coordinates epignatelli/navix/navix/grid.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · a6a3563b64257584 · report
probe_hparam_field_stats epignatelli/navix/navix/es.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · babff6f579982c24 · report
sample_antithetic_candidates epignatelli/navix/navix/es.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bf7f4b56213cfb45 · report
straight_through_sample epignatelli/navix/navix/agents/models.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 27056902b3134a1a · report
unimix_categorical epignatelli/navix/navix/agents/models.py official repository ran Apache-2.0 (permissive) · bbd549a9780617e8 · report

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Deep Reinforcement LearningDiversityMeta-LearningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)Representation Learningreinforcement-learning

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