Maintenance/update readme #378
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arnupretorius
requested review from
KaleabTessera,
AsadJeewa,
DriesSmit,
RuanJohn and
jcformanek
AsadJeewa
reviewed
Feb 3, 2022
README.md
Outdated
| > From incorporating the latest research and innovations to making the framework more stable, robust and well tested. | ||
| > Furthermore, we are committed and will do our best to keep everything working and have the experience of using Mava be as pleasant as possible. | ||
| > During Beta development breaking changes may occur as well as significant design changes (if we feel it could greatly improve the useability of the framework) but these will be clearly communicated before being incorporated into the codebase. | ||
| > It is also inevitable that there might be bugs we are not aware of and that things might break from time to time. We will do our best to fix these bugs and address any issues as quickly as possible. ⭐ | ||
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| **UPDATE**: The team has been hard at work over the past few months to improve Mava's systems performance, stability and robustness. These efforts include extensively benchmarking system implementations, fixing bugs and profiling performance and speed. The culmination of this work will be reflected in our next stable release. However, during this period, we have learned a lot about what works and what doesn't. In particular, our current base system design allows for a decent amount of flexibility but quickly becomes difficult to maintain with growing signatures and system constructors as additional modules get added. Our class designs are also overly reliant on wrappers and inheritance which do not scale as well as we would like with increases in system complexity. Furthermore, our original motivation for choosing Tensorflow 2 (TF2) as our deep learning backend was to align with Acme's large repository of RL abstractions and tools for TF2. These were very useful for initially building our systems. But since then, we have found TF2 less performant and flexible than we desire given alternative frameworks. Acme has also affirmed their support of Jax underlying much of the DeepMind RL ecosystem. Therefore, in the coming months, following our stable release, **we plan to rollout a more modular and flexible build system specifically for Jax-based systems.** Please note that all TF2-based systems using the old build system will be maintained during the rollout. However, once a stable Jax release has been made with the new build system, Mava will only support a single DL backend, namely Jax, and we will begin to deprecate all TF2 systems and building support. That said, we will make sure to communicate clearly and often during the migration from TF2 to Jax. |
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This is very clear regarding the reasons for changes but is this not too much information for the external user? Don't normally see explanations but perhaps we want to be different and keep the user in the loop.
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I'm very much for being as transparent and open as possible but at the same time willing to hear alternatives and arguments against this. Just note, this discussion is of course already public 😄 So happy to take it offline if needed.
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ah yes its easy to forget that
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Some important updates to the README. I really like that we are moving away from Acme and it shows the progress that the team has made. |
RuanJohn
reviewed
Feb 3, 2022
RuanJohn
approved these changes
Feb 3, 2022
KaleabTessera
approved these changes
Feb 4, 2022
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What?
Update to readme to remove outdated information and share more info on Mava's future roadmap.
Why?
It is important to be transparent and keep users up to date.
How?
Update main repo readme.
closes #378