Building2Building: A Large Scale Benchmark for Generalizable Real-World Reinforcement Learning

Constrained Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a significant research area within RL, where integrating constraints with rewards is crucial for enhancing safety and performance across diverse control tasks. In the context of heating systems in the buildings, optimizing the energy efficiency while maintaining the residents' thermal comfort can be intuitively formulated as a constrained optimization problem. However, to solve it with RL may require large amount of data. Therefore, an accurate and versatile simulator is favored. In this paper, we propose a novel building simulator I4B which provides interfaces for different usages and apply a model-free constrained RL algorithm named constrained Soft Actor-Critic with Linear Smoothed Log Barrier function (CSAC-LB) to the heating optimization problem. Benchmarking against baseline algorithms demonstrates CSAC-LB's efficiency in data exploration, constraint satisfaction and performance.

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) offers a promising approach for data-efficient energy management in buildings, combining the strengths of predictive modeling and reinforcement learning. While previous MBRL methods applied to HVAC control have reduced training data requirements, they still require several months of interaction with the building to learn a satisfactory control policy. A key reason is that existing surrogate models attempt to predict the entire state-space, including weather and electricity prices that are unaffected by control actions, or completely ignore these variables. Addressing these issues, we propose Counter-Dyna, a method that enhances the data-efficiency of Dyna, an MBRL method. We create data-efficient counterfactual surrogate models (CSM) by leveraging invariances in the state-space. Using a CSM in Dyna speeds up RL training measured in environment interaction data compared to previous results. In comparison with previous state-of-the-art that used 6-12 months of environment interactions, our method needs only 5 weeks. We evaluate our method in a large simulation study using the literature standard BOPTEST framework and proximal policy algorithm (PPO) as the RL algorithm. Our results show cost-saving potentials of 5.3% to 17.0% in a hypothetical deployment scenario. Our work is a significant step towards making real-world deployment of RL algorithms in HVAC control practically viable.

Today's AI models learn primarily through mimicry and refining, so it is not surprising that they struggle to solve problems beyond the limits set by existing data. To solve novel problems, agents should acquire skills by exploring and learning through experience. Finding a scalable learning mechanism for developing agents that learn through interaction remains a major open problem. In this work, we introduce BuilderBench, a benchmark to accelerate research into agent training that centers open-ended exploration. BuilderBench requires agents to learn how to build any structure using blocks. BuilderBench is equipped with (1) a simulator of a robot interacting with various physical blocks, and (2) a task-suite with over 50 diverse target structures that are carefully curated to test an understanding of physics, mathematics, and long-horizon planning. Agents are provided with a target structure at the start, and can interact with the environment for multiple episodes to experiment and learn various skills for building the structure. Solving these tasks requires \emph{embodied reasoning} in a way that is not reflected in words but rather in actions, experimenting with different strategies and piecing them together. Our experiments with multiple state-of-the-art frontier language model based agents and tabula rasa reinforcement learning algorithms show that these agents cannot solve any of the non-trivial tasks in the BuilderBench. Our analysis throws light on the lack of exploration abilities in these models.