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Cogment Low-Level API guide

Who is this for

  • Projects that involve tech stacks for which there is no high-level support yet.
  • Developers of the framework itself.
  • Curious people.

Prerequisites

The actual implementation of the Low-Level API uses gRPC. As this document is not meant to teach how to use the gRPC protocol and/or libraries, it will be assumed that the reader understands these concepts already.

Differences from the High-Level API

The high-level API takes a very object-oriented approach to trial management. Starting a trial creates an instance of an environment, as well as instances of agents.

gRPC services

The low-level API is fully described within the gRPC service definitions found in the api/cogment directory of the cogment framework source.

Agent Service

api/cogment/agent.proto describes the service that agent applications have to implement.

  • Start() is called when a trial starts.
  • End() is called when a trial ends.
  • Update() is called to request an action from the agent, given an observation.
  • Reward() is called to inform the agent of received feedback.
  • Message() is called to inform the agent of received messages.

Environment Service

api/cogment/environment.proto describes the service that environment applications have to implement.

  • Start() is called when a trial starts.
  • End() is called when a trial ends.
  • Update() is called to request an updated set of observations based on fresh actions.
  • Message() is called to inform the environment of received messages.

Frontend API

api/cogment/orchestrator.proto describes the service the orchestrator exposes that frontend applications use to create and manipulate trials.

  • StartTrial() to request the start of a new trial.
  • TerminateTrial() to request the end of the trial.
  • SendMessage() to send a message to an agent or the environment
  • TrialInfo() to request additional information about an existing trial.

Data Log Exporter API

api/cogment/data.proto describes the services provided to save all trial data (for archival, replay or offline analysis).

  • Log() to log a data sample (i.e. normally all data from a single tick/timestep)

Hooks API

api/cogment/hooks.proto describes the hook services provided to allow per trial configuration changes at runtime.

  • PreTrial() is called before a trial starts.

Common Data

Most of the common data is found in api/cogment/common.proto, but other "common" data could be found in other proto files.

Observation

The observation class contains the observation data for an actor (ObservationData). The type is generic (bytes) to accomodate the different observation classes defined for each actor (after serialization), and the snapshot and delta observations (which are defined in the cogment.yaml file).

The snapshot boolean, if set to True, indicates that the observation is a snapshot (i.e. full), and if False, indicates that the data is a delta encoding of the observation (i.e. changes only).

ObservationSet

The observationSet class is used by the environment to send multiple observations (i.e. one per actors) to the orchestrator. The list of observations matches one-for-one with the list of actors.

Actor IDs

Each actor within a trial is assigned an actor ID. Actor IDs are assigned deterministically from their order of instantiation within the cogment.yaml file, starting from 0.