Unity tweaks AI training tools, makes bid for academic respect

Unity Technologies on Monday released version 0.5 of its ML-Agents toolkit to make its Unity 3D game development platform better suited for developing and training autonomous agent code via machine learning. Initially rolled out a year ago in beta, version 0.5 comes with a few improvements. There's a wrapper for Gym (a toolkit for developing and testing reinforcement learning algorithms), support for letting agents make multiple action selections at once and for preventing agents from taking certain actions, and a refurbished set of environments called Marathon Environments. In these virtual spaces, AI researchers can teach software agents to perform certain tasks by rewarding them for correct actions. This sort of reinforcement learning can be limited to digital environments like video games or mapped to software-driven machines in the real world. Through its latest code update, Unity is making the case for Unity 3D as a key tool for AI research, a goal that company code boffins describe in a preprint paper titled, "Unity: A General Platform for Intelligent Agents."