Papers › Obstacle Tower: A Generalization Challenge in Vision, Control, and Planning

Obstacle Tower: A Generalization Challenge in Vision, Control, and Planning

4 Feb 2019arXiv:1902.01378archive 2025-07-28

Arthur Juliani, Ahmed Khalifa, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Jonathan Harper, Ervin Teng, Hunter Henry, Adam Crespi, Julian Togelius, Danny Lange

The rapid pace of recent research in AI has been driven in part by the presence of fast and challenging simulation environments. These environments often take the form of games; with tasks ranging from simple board games, to competitive video games. We propose a new benchmark - Obstacle Tower: a high fidelity, 3D, 3rd person, procedurally generated environment. An agent playing Obstacle Tower must learn to solve both low-level control and high-level planning problems in tandem while learning from pixels and a sparse reward signal. Unlike other benchmarks such as the Arcade Learning Environment, evaluation of agent performance in Obstacle Tower is based on an agent's ability to perform well on unseen instances of the environment. In this paper we outline the environment and provide a set of baseline results produced by current state-of-the-art Deep RL methods as well as human players. These algorithms fail to produce agents capable of performing near human level.

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Tasks

Atari GamesBoard Games

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

Obstacle Tower

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (No Gen) fixed RNB Score 7 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (No Gen) fixed PPO Score 5 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (No Gen) varied RNB Score 4.8 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (No Gen) varied PPO Score 1 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) fixed PPO Score 0.6 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) fixed RNB Score 0.6 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) varied RNB Score 0.8 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) varied PPO Score 0.6 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) fixed PPO Score 1.2 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) fixed RNB Score 1 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) varied RNB Score 3.4 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
General Reinforcement Learning Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) varied PPO Score 0.8 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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