MineRL: A Large-Scale Dataset of Minecraft Demonstrations
This dataset addresses the lack of large-scale, high-quality demonstration data for reinforcement learning, enabling benchmarking and development of more sample-efficient methods, though it is incremental as it builds on existing dataset concepts.
The authors tackled the sample inefficiency problem in deep reinforcement learning by introducing MineRL, a large-scale dataset of over 60 million annotated state-action pairs from human demonstrations in Minecraft, which facilitates research on methods leveraging human examples.
The sample inefficiency of standard deep reinforcement learning methods precludes their application to many real-world problems. Methods which leverage human demonstrations require fewer samples but have been researched less. As demonstrated in the computer vision and natural language processing communities, large-scale datasets have the capacity to facilitate research by serving as an experimental and benchmarking platform for new methods. However, existing datasets compatible with reinforcement learning simulators do not have sufficient scale, structure, and quality to enable the further development and evaluation of methods focused on using human examples. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive, large-scale, simulator-paired dataset of human demonstrations: MineRL. The dataset consists of over 60 million automatically annotated state-action pairs across a variety of related tasks in Minecraft, a dynamic, 3D, open-world environment. We present a novel data collection scheme which allows for the ongoing introduction of new tasks and the gathering of complete state information suitable for a variety of methods. We demonstrate the hierarchality, diversity, and scale of the MineRL dataset. Further, we show the difficulty of the Minecraft domain along with the potential of MineRL in developing techniques to solve key research challenges within it.