ChemGymRL: An Interactive Framework for Reinforcement Learning for
  Digital Chemistry
Chris Beeler Sriram Ganapathi Subramanian Kyle Sprague Nouha Chatti Colin Bellinger Mitchell Shahen Nicholas Paquin Mark Baula Amanuel Dawit Zihan Yang Xinkai Li Mark Crowley Isaac Tamblyn
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.