REINFORCE / actor-critic (CartPole)

A policy-gradient agent with a value baseline + entropy bonus that solves the Gymnasium CartPole-v1 benchmark (greedy return near the 500 maximum).

Trained from scratch in Ropedia Academy — an interactive, bilingual course on embodied & spatial AI. Educational model: small and quick to train; the value is the method and a reproducible pipeline, not a leaderboard score. Try it live in the Ropedia demos Space.

At a glance

Dataset

• Name: Gymnasium CartPole-v1
• Type: standard RL benchmark environment (no fixed dataset)
• Size / stats: 4-D continuous state, 2 discrete actions; reward +1/step, episode cap 500; agent learns from its own rollouts
• Split: online RL; greedy eval over 20 episodes
• Source: Gymnasium (Farama Foundation) CartPole-v1

Training config

Actor-critic; Adam (lr 3e-3), 600 episodes, γ=0.99, entropy 0.01, value baseline. EPISODES env-overridable.

Evaluation results

Robustness (mean ± std over 5 seeds)

Single-run numbers above are one seed; this is the distribution over independent re-trains (honest variance — no cherry-picking).

Inference example

import torch, torch.nn as nn
policy = nn.Sequential(nn.Linear(4,64), nn.Tanh(), nn.Linear(64,2))
policy.load_state_dict(torch.load("policy.pt", map_location="cpu")); policy.eval()
# CartPole state s = [x, x_dot, theta, theta_dot]
# action = int(policy(torch.tensor(s, dtype=torch.float32)).argmax())   # 0 = push left, 1 = push right

Limitations

Educational scale. Trained quickly on CPU on small or synthetic data, so absolute numbers are not competitive with production systems — the value is the method and a reproducible pipeline. No large-scale data, no hyperparameter sweep, and no multi-seed variance is reported. Not for production use.

Solves CartPole only — not a general control policy; on-policy and high-variance.

Failure cases

High-variance gradients; a length-1 episode gives a NaN advantage (std 0) — fixed with unbiased=False + grad clipping; stalls without the entropy bonus.

Reproduce / train your own

One click: open the notebook in Colab → Runtime → GPU → Run all, then run its Publish to the Hugging Face Hub cell.

From a shell:

git clone https://github.com/ChaoYue0307/ropedia-academy.git && cd ropedia-academy
pip install torch numpy matplotlib scikit-learn scikit-image gymnasium
jupyter nbconvert --to notebook --execute notebooks/training/AG_reinforce_gridworld.ipynb --output run.ipynb
# optional: override training length, e.g.  STEPS=2000  (or EPISODES=600)  before running

Files

• figure.png
• metrics.json
• policy.pt
• seeds.png

License

Code & weights: MIT (this repository) — educational use encouraged.
Environment: Gymnasium (Farama Foundation) — MIT license.

Citation

If you use this model or the course materials, please cite:

@misc{ropedia_academy,
  title  = {Ropedia Academy: an interactive course on embodied & spatial AI},
  author = {Ropedia Academy},
  year   = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://chaoyue0307.github.io/ropedia-academy/}}
}

Method / original work: Williams, REINFORCE, 1992; Sutton et al., Policy Gradient Methods, NeurIPS 1999; Brockman et al., OpenAI Gym, 2016.

Related assets

• 🚀 Live demos: https://huggingface.co/spaces/cy0307/ropedia-demos
• 🤗 All trained models + collection: https://huggingface.co/cy0307
• 📚 Course & all labs: https://chaoyue0307.github.io/ropedia-academy/ · Labs tab
• 💻 Source / notebooks: github.com/ChaoYue0307/ropedia-academy

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Part of the Ropedia Academy trained-model collection. Contributions & issues welcome on GitHub.