# Leveraging Procedural Generation to Benchmark Reinforcement Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.01588 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01588/

## Key facts

- Cited by 483 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Dec 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 483)

- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning at the Edge of the Statistical Precipice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13264/) (2021)
- [Domain Generalization: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.02503/) (2021)
- [Genie: Generative Interactive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15391/) (2024)
- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [MetaDrive: Composing Diverse Driving Scenarios for Generalizable Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12674/) (2021)
- [Benchmarking the Spectrum of Agent Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06780/) (2021)
- [Evolving Curricula with Regret-Based Environment Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01302/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Zero-shot Generalisation in Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09794/) (2021)
- [Recursive Introspection: Teaching Language Model Agents How to Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18219/) (2024)
- [Bigger, Better, Faster: Human-level Atari with human-level efficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19452/) (2023)
- [HIQL: Offline Goal-Conditioned RL with Latent States as Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11949/) (2023)
- [URLB: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15191/) (2021)
- [Human-Timescale Adaptation in an Open-Ended Task Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07608/) (2023)
- [REASONING GYM: Reasoning Environments for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24760/) (2025)
- [Goal Misgeneralization: Why Correct Specifications Aren't Enough For Correct Goals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01790/) (2022)
- [Goal Misgeneralization in Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14111/) (2021)
- [Recurrent Model-Free RL Can Be a Strong Baseline for Many POMDPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05038/) (2021)
- [SMACv2: An Improved Benchmark for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07489/) (2022)
- [Learning to Act without Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10812/) (2023)
- [Learning to drive from a world on rails](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.00636/) (2021)
- [BetterBench: Assessing AI Benchmarks, Uncovering Issues, and Establishing Best Practices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12990/) (2024)
- [AdaWorld: Learning Adaptable World Models with Latent Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18938/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Large Language Model-Based Game Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02039/) (2024)
- [Replay-Guided Adversarial Environment Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02439/) (2021)
- [Why Generalization in RL is Difficult: Epistemic POMDPs and Implicit Partial Observability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06277/) (2021)
- [Broken Neural Scaling Laws](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14891/) (2022)
- [UniDexGrasp++: Improving Dexterous Grasping Policy Learning via Geometry-aware Curriculum and Iterative Generalist-Specialist Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00464/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce Procgen Benchmark, a suite of 16 procedurally generated game-like environments designed to benchmark both sample efficiency and generalization in reinforcement learning. We believe that the community will benefit from increased access to high quality training environments, and we provide detailed experimental protocols for using this benchmark. We empirically demonstrate that diverse environment distributions are essential to adequately train and evaluate RL agents, thereby motivating the extensive use of procedural content generation. We then use this benchmark to investigate the effects of scaling model size, finding that larger models significantly improve both sample efficiency and generalization.
