Important enhancements

• Rainbow (https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.02298) with benchmark results is added. (thanks @seann999!)
• Agent class: chainerrl.agents.CategoricalDoubleDQN
• Example and benchmark results: https://github.com/chainer/chainerrl/tree/v0.7.0/examples/atari/rainbow
• TD3 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.09477) with benchmark results is added.
• Agent class: chainerrl.agents.TD3
• Example and benchmark results: https://github.com/chainer/chainerrl/tree/v0.7.0/examples/mujoco/td3
• PPO now supports recurrent models.
• Example: https://github.com/chainer/chainerrl/tree/v0.7.0/examples/ale/train_ppo_ale.py (with --recurrent option)
• Results: https://github.com/chainer/chainerrl/pull/431
• DDPG now supports batch training
• Example: https://github.com/chainer/chainerrl/tree/v0.7.0/examples/gym/train_ddpg_batch_gym.py

Important bugfixes

• The bug that some examples use the same random seed across envs for env.seed is fixed.
• The bug that batch training with n-step return and/or recurrent models is not successful is fixed.
• The bug that examples/ale/train_dqn_ale.py uses LinearDecayEpsilonGreedy even when NoisyNet is used is fixed.
• The bug that examples/ale/train_dqn_ale.py does not use the value specified by --noisy-net-sigma is fixed.
• The bug that chainerrl.links.to_factorized_noisy does not work correctly with chainerrl.links.Sequence is fixed.

Important destructive changes

• chainerrl.experiments.train_agent_async now requires eval_n_steps (number of timesteps for each evaluation phase) and eval_n_episodes (number of episodes for each evaluation phase) to be explicitly specified, with one of them being None.
• examples/ale/dqn_phi.py is removed.
• chainerrl.initializers.LeCunNormal is removed. Use chainer.initializers.LeCunNormal instead.

All updates

Enhancement

• Rainbow (#374)
• Make copy_param support scalar parameters (#410)
• Enables batch DDPG agents to be trained. (#416)
• Enables asynchronous time-based evaluations of agents. (#420)
• Removes obsolete dqn_phi file (#424)
• Add Branched and use it to simplify train_ppo_batch_gym.py (#427)
• Remove LeCunNormal since Chainer has it from v3 (#428)
• Precompute log probability in PPO (#430)
• Recurrent PPO with a stateless recurrent model interface (#431)
• Replace Variable.data with Variable.array (again) (#434)
• Make IQN work with tuple observations (#435)
• Add VectorStackFrame to reduce memory usage in train_dqn_batch_ale.py (#443)
• DDPG example that reproduces the TD3 paper (#452)
• TD3 agent (#453)
• update requirements.txt and setup.py for gym (#461)
• Support gym>=0.12.2 by stopping to use underscore methods in gym wrappers (#462)
• Add warning about numpy 1.16.0 (#476)

Documentation

• Link to abstract pages on ArXiv (#409)
• fixes typo (#412)
• Fixes file path in grasping example README (#422)
• Add links to references (#425)
• Fixes minor grammar mistake in A3C ALE example (#432)
• Add explanation of examples/atari (#437)
• Link to chainer/chainer, not pfnet/chainer (#439)
• Link to chainer/chainer(rl), not pfnet/chainer(rl) (#440)
• fix & add docstring for FCStateQFunctionWithDiscreteAction (#441)
• Fixes a typo in train_agent_batch Documentation. (#444)
• Adds Rainbow to main README (#447)
• Fixes Docstring in IQN (#451)
• Improves Rainbow README (#458)
• very small fix: add missing doc for eval_performance. (#459)
• Adds IQN Results to readme (#469)
• Adds IQN to the documentation. (#470)
• Adds reference to mujoco folder in the examples README (#474)
• Fixes incorrect comment. (#490)

Examples

• Rainbow (#374)
• Create an IQN example aimed at reproducing the original paper and its evaluation protocol. (#408)
• Benchmarks DQN example (#414)
• Enables batch DDPG agents to be trained. (#416)
• Fixes scores for Demon Attack (#418)
• Set observation_space of kuka env correctly (#421)
• Fixes error in setting explorer in DQN ALE example. (#423)
• Add Branched and use it to simplify train_ppo_batch_gym.py (#427)
• A3C Example for reproducing paper results. (#433)
• PPO example that reproduces the "Deep Reinforcement Learning that Matters" paper (#448)
• DDPG example that reproduces the TD3 paper (#452)
• TD3 agent (#453)
• Apply noisy_net_sigma parameter (#465)

Testing

• Use Python 3.6 in Travis CI (#411)
• Increase tolerance of TestGaussianDistribution.test_entropy since sometimes it failed (#438)
• make FrameStack follow original spaces (#445)
• Split test_examples.sh (#472)
• Fix Travis error (#492)
• Use Python 3.6 for ipynb (#493)

Bugfixes

• bugfix (#360, thanks @corochann!)
• Fixes error in setting explorer in DQN ALE example. (#423)
• Make sure the agent sees when episodes end (#429)
• Pass env_id to replay buffer methods to correctly support batch training (#442)
• Add VectorStackFrame to reduce memory usage in train_dqn_batch_ale.py (#443)
• Fix a bug of unintentionally using same process indices (#455)
• Make cv2 dependency optional (#456)
• fix ScaledFloatFrame.observation_space (#460)
• Apply noisy_net_sigma parameter (#465)
• Match EpisodicReplayBuffer.sample with ReplayBuffer.sample (#485)
• Make to_factorized_noisy work with sequential links (#489)