Foundation: An Economic Simulation Framework

This resource contains an implementation of Foundation, a framework for flexible, modular, and composable environments that model socio-economic behaviors and dynamics in a society with both agents and governments.

Foundation provides a Gym-style API:

• reset: resets the environment's state and returns the observation.
• step: advances the environment by one timestep, and returns the tuple (observation, reward, done, info).

This simulation can be used in conjunction with reinforcement learning to learn optimal economic policies, as detailed in the following papers:

The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policies, Stephan Zheng, Alexander Trott, Sunil Srinivasa, Nikhil Naik, Melvin Gruesbeck, David C. Parkes, Richard Socher.

The AI Economist: Optimal Economic Policy Design via Two-level Deep Reinforcement Learning Stephan Zheng, Alexander Trott, Sunil Srinivasa, David C. Parkes, Richard Socher.

Building a Foundation for Data-Driven, Interpretable, and Robust Policy Design using the AI Economist Alexander Trott, Sunil Srinivasa, Douwe van der Wal, Sebastien Haneuse, Stephan Zheng.

If you use this code in your research, please cite us using this BibTeX entry:

@misc{2004.13332,
 Author = {Stephan Zheng, Alexander Trott, Sunil Srinivasa, Nikhil Naik, Melvin Gruesbeck, David C. Parkes, Richard Socher},
 Title = {The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policies},
 Year = {2020},
 Eprint = {arXiv:2004.13332},
}

For more information and context, check out:

• The AI Economist website](https://www.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist)
• Blog: The AI Economist: Improving Equality and Productivity with AI-Driven Tax Policies](https://blog.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist/)
• Blog: The AI Economist moonshot](https://blog.einstein.ai/the-ai-economist-moonshot/)
• Blog: The AI Economist web demo of the COVID-19 case study](https://blog.einstein.ai/ai-economist-covid-case-study-ethics/)
• Web demo: The AI Economist ethical review of AI policy design and COVID-19 case study

Simulation Cards: Ethics Review and Intended Use

Please see our Simulation Card for a review of the intended use and ethical review of our framework.

Please see our COVID-19 Simulation Card for a review of the ethical aspects of the pandemic simulation (and as fitted for COVID-19).

Multi-Agent Simulations

• economic_simulation_basic: Shows how to interact with and visualize the simulation.
• economic_simulation_advanced: Explains how Foundation is built up using composable and flexible building blocks.
• optimal_taxation_theory_and_simulation: Demonstrates how economic simulations can be used to study the problem of optimal taxation.
• covid19_and_economic_simulation: Introduces a simulation on the COVID-19 pandemic and economy that can be used to study different health and economic policies .

Multi-Agent Training

• multi_agent_gpu_training_with_warp_drive
• Introduces our multi-agent reinforcement learning framework WarpDrive, which we then use to train the COVID-19 and economic simulation.

Testing the Tutorials:

Familiarize yourself with WarpDrive by running these four tutorials using quick deploy feature. To help you get started, we have created a sample Jupyter Notebook that can be easily deployed on Vertex AI using NGC’s One Click Deploy feature. This feature automatically sets up the Vertex AI instance with an optimal configuration, preloads the dependencies, runs the software from NGC without any need to set up the infrastructure.

Simply click on the button that reads “Deploy to Vertex AI” and follow the instructions.

Note: A customized kernel for the Jupyter Notebook is used as the primary mechanism for deployment. This kernel has been built on the TAO Toolkit container. For more information on the container itself, please refer to this link for more information:

https://catalog.ngc.nvidia.com/orgs/partners/teams/salesforce/containers/warpdrive

The container version: nvcr.io/partners/salesforce/warpdrive:v1.0

Changelog

For the complete release history, see CHANGELOG.md.

License

Foundation and the AI Economist are released under the BSD-3 License.