{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/obstacle-tower-a-generalization-challenge-in","title":"Obstacle Tower: A Generalization Challenge in Vision, Control, and Planning","arxiv_id":"1902.01378","date":"2019-02-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Arthur Juliani","Ahmed Khalifa","Vincent-Pierre Berges","Jonathan Harper","Ervin Teng","Hunter Henry","Adam Crespi","Julian Togelius","Danny Lange"],"abstract":"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.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.01378v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.01378v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"obstacle-tower-a-generalization-challenge-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-env","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null},{"paper_slug":"obstacle-tower-a-generalization-challenge-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/dazcona/obstacletower","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"obstacle-tower-a-generalization-challenge-in","repo_url":"https://github.com/odokumaci/rainbow-unity-obstacle-tower-challenge","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"atari-games","task_name":"Atari Games"},{"task_slug":"board-games","task_name":"Board Games"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[{"slug":"obstacle-tower","name":"Obstacle Tower","full_name":""}],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (No Gen) fixed","model":"RNB","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"7"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (No Gen) fixed","model":"PPO","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"5"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-1","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (No Gen) varied","model":"RNB","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"4.8"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-1","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (No Gen) varied","model":"PPO","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"1"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-4","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) fixed","model":"PPO","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"0.6"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-4","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) fixed","model":"RNB","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"0.6"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-5","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) varied","model":"RNB","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"0.8"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-5","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Strong Gen) varied","model":"PPO","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"0.6"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-2","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) fixed","model":"PPO","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"1.2"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-2","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) fixed","model":"RNB","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"1"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-3","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) varied","model":"RNB","rank_in_archive_order":1,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"3.4"},"uses_additional_data":false},{"leaderboard":"/sota/general-reinforcement-learning-on-obstacle-3","task":"General Reinforcement Learning","dataset":"Obstacle Tower (Weak Gen) varied","model":"PPO","rank_in_archive_order":2,"of":2,"metrics":{"Score":"0.8"},"uses_additional_data":false}],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1902.01378","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1902.01378"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/dazcona/obstacletower","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/odokumaci/rainbow-unity-obstacle-tower-challenge","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-env","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_violates":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"448599b47d160e4f","entry":"run_episode","repo":"Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-env","repo_kind":"official","path":"examples/evaluation.py","file_url":"https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/obstacle-tower-env/blob/HEAD/examples/evaluation.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_violates","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"VIOLATES","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"448599b47d160e4f"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}