MineRL: A Large-Scale Dataset of Minecraft Demonstrations

TL;DR

The paper introduces MineRL, a large-scale, high-quality dataset of human demonstrations in Minecraft, designed to advance reinforcement learning research by providing extensive, structured data for developing sample-efficient algorithms.

Contribution

It presents a novel, scalable data collection scheme for creating a comprehensive Minecraft demonstration dataset, enabling new research directions in reinforcement learning with human data.

Findings

MineRL contains over 60 million state-action pairs.

The dataset demonstrates diversity and hierarchical structure.

Minecraft presents significant challenges for reinforcement learning.

Abstract

The sample inefficiency of standard deep reinforcement learning methods precludes their application to many real-world problems. Methods which leverage human demonstrations require fewer samples but have been researched less. As demonstrated in the computer vision and natural language processing communities, large-scale datasets have the capacity to facilitate research by serving as an experimental and benchmarking platform for new methods. However, existing datasets compatible with reinforcement learning simulators do not have sufficient scale, structure, and quality to enable the further development and evaluation of methods focused on using human examples. Therefore, we introduce a comprehensive, large-scale, simulator-paired dataset of human demonstrations: MineRL. The dataset consists of over 60 million automatically annotated state-action pairs across a variety of related tasks in Minecraft, a dynamic, 3D, open-world environment. We present a novel data collection scheme which allows for the ongoing introduction of new tasks and the gathering of complete state information suitable for a variety of methods. We demonstrate the hierarchality, diversity, and scale of the MineRL dataset. Further, we show the difficulty of the Minecraft domain along with the potential of MineRL in developing techniques to solve key research challenges within it.