This paper proposes a probabilistic planner that can solve goal-conditional tasks such as complex continuous control problems. The approach reaches state-of-the-art performance when compared to current deep reinforcement learning algorithms. However, the method relies on an ensemble of deep generative models and is computationally intensive. It would be interesting to reproduce the results presented in this paper on their robotic manipulation and navigation problems as these are very challenging problems that current reinforcement learning methods cannot easily solve (and when they do, they require a significantly larger number of experiences). Can the results be reproduced out-of-the-box with the provided code?
In theory, reproducing this paper should only require a clone of a public Git repository, and the execution of a Makefile (detailed in the README of the paper repository at https://github.com/psychoinformatics-de/paper-remodnav). We've set up our paper to be dynamically generated, retrieving and installing the relevant data and software automatically, and we've even created a tutorial about it, so that others can reuse the same setup for their work. Nevertheless, we've for example never tried it out across different operating systems - who knows whether it works on Windows? We'd love to share the tips and tricks we found to work, and even more love feedback on how to improve this further.
Most of the material is available through Jupyter notebooks in GitHub, and it should be easy to reproduce with the help of Binder. With the notebooks, you could experiment with different parameters to the ones analyzed in the paper. It also contains a large dataset of physical parameters of galaxies analysed in this work. We expect this work to be easily reproducible in the steps described in the repository.
Paper and codes+data have been published 4 years ago, will they still work? I always try to release data and codes to reproduce my papers, but I seldom receive feedback. It would be useful to have comments from a reproducers' team, in order to improve sharing for future research (I switched from MATLAB to Python already).
I tried hard to make this paper as reproducible as possible, but as techniques and dependencies become more complex, it is hard to make it 100% clear. Any form of feedback is more than welcome.
I guess it could be a cool learning experience. The paper is written with knitr, uses a seed, is part of the R package it describes, was openly written using version control (SVN, R-Forge) and is available in an open access journal (@up_jors).
This was my third attempt at making a paper fully reproducible. To date I it's the most reproducible that I have published. I'm interested to know what stumbling blocks exist that I'm not aware of (aside from needing software like ArcGIS to fully rerun the complete analysis).