ChemGymRL: An Interactive Framework for Reinforcement Learning for Digital Chemistry
This work addresses the challenge of data-intensive and potentially hazardous real-world training for RL in chemistry, offering a domain-specific tool for researchers in digital chemistry and AI.
The paper tackles the problem of applying reinforcement learning to chemical discovery by introducing ChemGymRL, a simulated laboratory environment based on OpenAI Gym, which provides customizable virtual chemical benches for training RL agents and demonstrates the performance of standard RL algorithms on these benches.
This paper provides a simulated laboratory for making use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) for chemical discovery. Since RL is fairly data intensive, training agents `on-the-fly' by taking actions in the real world is infeasible and possibly dangerous. Moreover, chemical processing and discovery involves challenges which are not commonly found in RL benchmarks and therefore offer a rich space to work in. We introduce a set of highly customizable and open-source RL environments, ChemGymRL, based on the standard Open AI Gym template. ChemGymRL supports a series of interconnected virtual chemical benches where RL agents can operate and train. The paper introduces and details each of these benches using well-known chemical reactions as illustrative examples, and trains a set of standard RL algorithms in each of these benches. Finally, discussion and comparison of the performances of several standard RL methods are provided in addition to a list of directions for future work as a vision for the further development and usage of ChemGymRL.