English

Automatic Generation of High-Performance RL Environments

Machine Learning 2026-05-19 v2 Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering

Abstract

Translating complex reinforcement learning (RL) environments into high-performance implementations has traditionally required months of specialized engineering. We present a closed-loop methodology that produces equivalent high-performance environments for minimal compute cost. Our method uses a generic prompt template, hierarchical verification (property, interaction, and rollout tests), iterative repair, and cross-backend policy transfer to verify no sim-to-sim gap. We demonstrate three distinct workflows across five environments: (1) Direct translation (no prior performance implementation exists) from Game Boy emulator PyBoy to our EmuRust (via Rust IPC) and from Pokemon Showdown to our PokeJAX (via JAX); (2) Translation verified against existing performance implementations via throughput parity with Puffer Pong, MJX and Brax at matched GPU batch sizes; and (3) New environment creation: TCGJax, the first Pokemon TCG Pocket environment, created from a web-extracted specification. At 200M parameters, the environment overhead drops below 4% of training time. Our closed-loop methodology confirms equivalence for all five environments. TCGJax, synthesized from a private reference absent from public repositories, serves as a contamination control for agent pretraining data concerns.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.12145,
  title  = {Automatic Generation of High-Performance RL Environments},
  author = {Seth Karten and Rahul Dev Appapogu and Chi Jin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.12145},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

20 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:17:06.727Z