I’m working with OpenAI Gym and trying to access benchmark specifications for Atari games. When I run my code, I get an error saying the module doesn’t have the benchmark_spec attribute.
This throws: AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'benchmark_spec'. I’m using gym version 0.10.9, and it used to work in earlier versions. Has this function been moved or renamed in newer releases? I need to load the Atari 40M benchmark suite for my reinforcement learning experiments. Any suggestions on how to fix this would be really helpful.
Had this exact problem last year when transitioning my research project. The benchmark_spec removal caught me off guard too - the docs weren’t clear about when it’d be deprecated. Here’s what worked for me: manually create the environment list that benchmark_spec used to provide. You can iterate through gym.envs.registry.all() and filter for Atari environments with patterns like the ‘ALE/’ prefix. Takes more manual work to replicate the exact Atari40M benchmark suite config though. If you need the legacy functionality right now, pin your gym version to 0.9.6 in requirements. Not ideal long-term since you’ll miss security updates, but it’ll get you unstuck.
yo, have you tried gym-retro? it’s pretty solid for atari benchmarks. if that fails, u can snag the old benchmark stuff from gym’s github and add it manually to ur project. a lil hacky, but it usually does the trick.
Yeah, this deprecation screwed over a lot of researchers working with Atari environments back then. The benchmark_spec function was just a wrapper that returned preset environment configs. For the Atari40M benchmark suite, check the OpenAI Baselines repo - they kept the original benchmark definitions as config files. You can grab the environment list from there and create them one by one with gym.make(). Or try the gym-benchmark package, which was made to handle this exact transition. It gives you backward compatibility for the removed benchmark stuff. Just heads up - some Atari environment names changed between versions too, so you’ll probably need to update from the old naming to the newer ALE prefixed versions.
Indeed, the benchmark_spec function was deprecated in version 0.10.x of Gym, leading to the error you encountered. I’ve faced similar issues when I upgraded from 0.9.6 to 0.10.9. A straightforward workaround is to access benchmark specifications directly through the gym.envs.registration module instead. You can use gym.envs.registration.load('ALE/Breakout-v5') to retrieve Atari environments. For a more sustainable solution, consider transitioning to Gymnasium, which is actively maintained and offers improved compatibility. The migration process is relatively simple and ensures better access to benchmarks through their updated API.
yea, gym kinda ditched benchmark_spec in those newer updates. u might wanna downgrade to 0.9.x or look into using gym.envs.registry.spec('AtariEnv-v0') instead. also, gymnasium is the new fork that’s still getting support.