AndroidEnv is a complex environment that, while offering an almost endless range of possibilites for RL research and investigation, poses multiple kinds of challenges simultaneously. In this document we outline AndroidEnv's main features that render it such a unique learning environment.
AndroidEnv is built on top of an emulated Android device, allowing the agent to communicate with the emulator through touch actions. Android emulators are created independently from our environment implementation and simulate real Android devices in the most realistic manner. This simulation runs real-time, independently of the agent, meaning that the simulaton will not wait for agent input between frames. This aspect of the environment renders the RL setup similar to a robotics problem, where the challenges of real-time interaction and consequent noise in observations have to be overcome. Please note there is currently no straightforward way to slow down the simulation either.
Perhaps one of the most interesting features of AndroidEnv is its large and
complex action interface. The raw action space of the environment consists of a
tuple (x,y) in [0,1]x[0,1] determining the location of the action on the
Android screen, and a discrete value ActionType in {LIFT, TOUCH, REPEAT}
indicating whether the agent wants to touch the screen at this chosen location
or not. This action space is uniform across all tasks/apps.
Gestures. The complexity of the interface arises from the fact that individual raw actions on their own do not neccessarily trigger a meaningful change in the environment. Most Android applications are designed such that they can be controlled/navigated through common touchscreen gestures such as pressing buttons, swiping, scrolling, pinching, drag and drop etc. Each of these can be thought of as particular sequences of raw actions: for example, touching the screen at a particular location, then immediately lifting the imaginary finger might be interpreted as a press of a button; while a sequence of touches aligned in a vertical line might be interpreted as scrolling. We note that AndroidEnv does not support multitouch actions at the moment, but it is a possible feature to add.
It is important to point out that it is out of the environment's control to determine how particular sequences of raw actions get interpreted by the Android simulator - much like when humans interact with physical devices, a certain gesture on the screen might be interpreted differently if it is performed at a slightly different angle or speed.
| Tap | Double Tap | Touch & Hold | Flick Left | Flick Right | Scroll (H) | Scroll (V) | Drag & Drop |
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Wrappers. It is possible to alter the raw action space of the environment by applying wrappers. For example one might discretize the action space by splitting the screen up into a grid of a desired size; restrict the ActionType to touch only; or fix certain gesture skills. We note here that these wrappers, again, will not alter how the particular sequence of performed raw actions gets interpreted by the Android simulator.
The observation space of AndroidEnv consists of three main components:
(pixels, timedelta, orientation), the most notable of these being
pixels. The original screen size will depend on the type of emulator used, but
given that it will correspond to real device screen sizes, this will usually be
quite large (of course, this can be scaled down, e.g. with wrappers). The
timedelta component captures the amount of time passed since the last
observation was fetched. The orientation, even though it does not affect the
layout of the RGB image in the observation, might carry relevant information for
the agent. For example, if there is text on the screen, it is important to know
how it is oriented. Again, a benefit of this observation space is that it is
uniform across all tasks. As mentioned above, observations often carry spatial
cues and are suggestive of the kind of actions/gestures that are meaningful to
perform in a given state.
On top of the default observations (pixels, timedelta, orientation), some
tasks might expose additional structured observations after each step. An
extra in AndroidEnv is any information that an app may send to aid the
understanding of the task. The type of information sent through this channel is
usually something difficult to obtain from raw pixels and may include meaningful
information such as:
- The current board configuration (e.g. of a chess game or of a tetris game) in matrix or string form.
- The position of the avatar in a map.
- Events such as whether a button was pressed or whether a checkpoint was achieved.
Note that these are entirely optional and may not be available at all.
To request extras from the environment, you can call env.task_extras() after
each env.step(), which will return a dictionary of all the extra observations
observed during the previous step (or an empty dict is there's none available).
For example:
for _ in range(FLAGS.n_steps):
action = agent.select_action(timestep.observation)
timestep = env.step(action)
logging.info('observation: %s', timestep.observation)
logging.info('extra observations: %s', env.task_extras())Please note however that the env might not return extras at every timestep, only when something meaningful happened (e.g. only when a button was pressed, or when the state of the board has changed).
When integrating your own APK as a new task for the environment, you can define your own extras by following the instructions here.
AndroidEnv's action- and observation spaces can be altered by applying suitable wrappers. While custom wrappers can be built easily, we have provided a number of useful wrappers that demonstrate their usage:
discrete_action_wrapper: Discretizes the action space into annxkgrid.flat_interface_wrapper: Removes the dictionary structure from the observation and action specs.float_pixels_wrapper: Projects the pixel RGB values from the integer range[0, 255]to the float range[0, 1].image_rescale_wrapper: Resizes the pixel observations by the selected ratio.gym_wrapper: Changes the environment interface from dm_env to OpenAI gym interface.last_action_wrapper: Extends the observation with a one-hot encoded location of the previously taken action, in order to aid agents without built-in memory.
The chart below gives an overview of the internal workings of the system, illustrating how different classes interact with each other and what their individual roles are. See the source code for more details.
