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name: atari-and-asl-workflows description: "Routes DRL-Pytorch Atari Noisy/Dueling/Double DQN, NoFrameskip, EnvIdex, wrapper, checkpoint, EnvPool, and Actor-Sharer-Learner workflows." disable-model-invocation: true metadata: disco-role: operating license: NO_LICENSE

Atari and ASL Workflows

Use this sub-skill when the request involves DRL-Pytorch Atari workflows: Pong, Enduro, NoFrameskip, AtariNames, EnvIdex, Noisy/Dueling/Double DQN flags, pretrained Atari checkpoints, Tianshou-style preprocessing wrappers, ALE ROM/license/OpenCV gates, EnvPool, or Actor-Sharer-Learner (ASL) multiprocessing.

Route here for

• Atari DQN training, evaluation, or checkpoint-loading commands under the Noisy/Duel/DDQN Atari workflow.
• Mapping --EnvIdex to Atari game names, especially 37 -> Pong and 20 -> Enduro.
• Combining --Double, --Duel, and --Noisy flags and matching them to checkpoint filenames.
• Explaining the Atari wrapper stack that returns torch.uint8 observations of shape (4, 84, 84).
• Diagnosing missing ALE ROMs, missing OpenCV, display/render failures, default CUDA-device failures, and optional EnvPool installation problems.
• Understanding ASL process roles: Actor, Sharer, Learner, Evaluator, and Recorder.

Route away

• Non-Atari CartPole, LunarLander, CliffWalking, PER, C51, or NoisyNet DQN requests belong to the value-based-discrete-control sibling.
• PPO, DDPG, TD3, SAC, Pendulum, MuJoCo, Box2D continuous-control, or other non-Atari actor-critic requests belong to the policy-and-actor-critic-control sibling.
• Full training benchmark recovery, ROM acquisition, license acceptance, heavyweight downloads, and checkpoint binary bundling are outside this sub-skill's safe default behavior.

Read first

• Atari runtime and wrappers for EnvIdex mapping, Pong/Enduro commands, algorithm flag combinations, wrapper order, checkpoint naming, and optional dependency gates.
• ASL framework for the EnvPool ASL topology, process responsibilities, major flags, device placement, and safe runtime boundaries.
• Troubleshooting when a task mentions ALE, ROMs, cv2, EnvPool, CUDA, multiprocessing hangs, rendering, long training, or checkpoint load failures.
• smoke_atari_asl.py for a CPU-only diagnostic that imports the Atari Agent and ASL utility modules from a user-supplied DRL-Pytorch checkout, runs dummy CNN forwards, and optionally probes wrapper or EnvPool imports without creating Atari ROM environments.

Safe operating flow

1. Identify whether the user wants the Atari DQN workflow or the ASL EnvPool framework. The Atari DQN workflow uses Name[EnvIdex] + "NoFrameskip-v4"; ASL uses Name[EnvIdex] + "-v5" with EnvPool.

2. Resolve EnvIdex: use 37 for Pong and 20 for Enduro unless the user explicitly names another game from the bundled Atari table.

3. Check gates before suggesting execution:

   • Atari DQN environment creation needs Gymnasium Atari support, accepted ALE ROM licensing, and OpenCV for frame warping.
   • ASL needs EnvPool on a supported platform plus Atari environment support; it launches multiple processes and is not a quick smoke.
   • CUDA is optional acceleration, but several launchers default to CUDA; set CPU device flags explicitly for CPU-only diagnostics.

4. For a no-ROM diagnostic, run the bundled smoke script, for example:

   python sub-skills/atari-and-asl-workflows/scripts/smoke_atari_asl.py --repo-root <repo-root>
   

   Add --probe-atari-wrappers or --probe-envpool only when diagnosing those optional imports. The script does not create Atari environments, download ROMs, start EnvPool workers, or run training.

5. For real Atari commands, use the copied command facts in the references and warn about side effects: environment creation, rendering, TensorBoard writes, checkpoint reads/writes, long training loops, and multiprocessing.

Output expectations

• Give commands with explicit --EnvIdex, algorithm toggles, and device flags.
• State whether a proposed command is a safe diagnostic, an environment-creation check, or a real training/rendering run.
• Match checkpoint names to the exact ExperimentName convention before loading: algorithm prefix plus Atari environment name plus _<ModelIdex>k.pth.
• Do not claim optional ROM/OpenCV/EnvPool/CUDA runtime has been verified unless the current user environment was actually probed for that task.