English

Beating Atari with Natural Language Guided Reinforcement Learning

Artificial Intelligence 2017-04-20 v1

Abstract

We introduce the first deep reinforcement learning agent that learns to beat Atari games with the aid of natural language instructions. The agent uses a multimodal embedding between environment observations and natural language to self-monitor progress through a list of English instructions, granting itself reward for completing instructions in addition to increasing the game score. Our agent significantly outperforms Deep Q-Networks (DQNs), Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) agents, and the best agents posted to OpenAI Gym on what is often considered the hardest Atari 2600 environment: Montezuma's Revenge.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1704.05539,
  title  = {Beating Atari with Natural Language Guided Reinforcement Learning},
  author = {Russell Kaplan and Christopher Sauer and Alexander Sosa},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1704.05539},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T19:20:42.092Z