FrozenLake

Description

FrozenLake is an ORS environment for evaluating agents on a grid navigation game where they must reach a goal while avoiding holes on a slippery frozen lake. This environment wraps the FrozenLake implementation from TextArena, a framework for text-based game environments.

Capabilities

• Navigation and pathfinding under uncertainty
• Risk-aware decision-making with stochastic transitions
• Spatial reasoning on grid-based environments

Compute Requirements

FrozenLake does not require a sandbox. It has minimal compute requirements.

License

MIT.

Tasks

There are two splits: train (450 tasks) and test (450 tasks). Each split contains 50 tasks across each of 9 variants:

• FrozenLake-v0: Standard frozen lake with formatted feedback
• FrozenLake-v0-train: Training variant with guidance
• FrozenLake-v0-raw: Raw feedback without formatting
• FrozenLake-v0-random: Random map generation
• FrozenLake-v0-random-train: Random maps with training guidance
• FrozenLake-v0-random-raw: Random maps with raw feedback
• FrozenLake-v0-hardcore: More challenging maps
• FrozenLake-v0-hardcore-train: Hardcore with training guidance
• FrozenLake-v0-hardcore-raw: Hardcore with raw feedback

Each task is seeded for reproducibility.

Reward Structure

This is a sparse reward environment. Rewards are mapped from TextArena's native range of {-1, 0, 1} to {0.0, 0.5, 1.0} via (raw + 1) / 2.

We do not use LLM graders for this environment; reward is determined programmatically.

Data

Game state is generated procedurally by the TextArena engine using seeded randomness. No external data files are required.

Tools

Agents are given a single tool:

• move(direction): Move in the given direction (up, down, left, right) on the frozen lake grid.

Time Horizon

FrozenLake is a multi-turn environment.

Environment Difficulty

Easy to Hard. The difficulty varies significantly across variants, from simple deterministic paths to complex randomly generated maps with slippery mechanics that add stochasticity to movement.

Other Environment Requirements

There are no further environment requirements; FrozenLake works out of the box without any secrets or API keys.

Safety

Agents in FrozenLake interact only with a grid navigation game and have no access to external systems, the internet, or sensitive data. The environment does not present safety risks.

Citations

@software{textarena2024,
  author    = {Guertler, Leon and Banting, Wilfried and Pignatelli, Eduardo},
  title     = {TextArena},
  year      = {2024},
  publisher = {GitHub},
  url       = {https://github.com/LeonGuertler/TextArena}
}