Customizing Monty

For more info on contributing custom modules, see Ways to Contribute to Code

Monty is designed as a modular framework where a user can easily swap out different implementations of the basic Monty components. For instance you should be able to switch out the type of learning module used without changing the sensor modules, environment, or motor system. The basic components of Monty are defined as abstract classes abstract_monty_classes.py. To implement your own custom version of one of these classes, simply subclass from the abstract class or one of its existing subclasses.

Each of the classes in this diagram can be subclasses and customized. The idea is that you can easily switch out different versions of each of these classes while keeping all the rest constant.

Customizing a Class - Example: Learning Module

Here are step by step instructions of how to customize a LearningModule class as an example.

Learning modules (LMs) can be loosely compared to cortical columns, and each learning module receives a subset of the input features. At each time step, each learning module performs a modeling step and a voting step. In the modeling step, LMs update in response to sensory inputs. In the voting step, each LM updates in response to the state of other LMs. Note that the operations each LM performs during the step and receive_votes invocations are customizable.

There is a 3-step process for creating a custom learning module. All other classes can be customized along the same lines.

Define a new subclass of LearningModule (LM) either in a local projects folder, or in /src/tbp/monty/frameworks/models. See the abstract class definitions in /src/tbp/monty/frameworks/models/abstract_monty_classes.py for the functions that every LM should implement.
Define a config for your learning module. You are encouraged but not required to provide default arguments to your LM. It may also be helpful to specify some common configurations for your LM in conf/experiment/config/monty/learning_modules/learning_module directory for use in your experiment configurations. Additionally, you could specify common expected configurations of multiple learning modules in conf/experiment/config/monty/learning_modules by defining a dictionary of LM IDs and specifying learning_module_class and its learning_module_args for each learning module.
Define an experiment config in conf/experiment/ (or in your own repository or in your monty_lab projects folder).

You custom experiment config could look like this:

defaults:
  - base_config_10distinctobj_dist_agent
  - config/monty/clear_monty_config@config
  - config/monty/[email protected]_config
  - config/monty/learning_modules/[email protected]_config

config:
  monty_config:
    learning_module_configs:
      learning_module_0:
        learning_module_class: ${monty.class:path.to.your.CustomLM}
        learning_module_args:
          your_arg1: val1
          your_arg2: val2

For simplicity we inherit all other default values from the base_config_10distinctobj_dist_agent config in conf/experiment/base_config_10distinctobj_dist_agent.yaml and use the monty_config specified in conf/experiment/config/monty/patch_and_view_sota.yaml.

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