English

Language Guided Exploration for RL Agents in Text Environments

Computation and Language 2024-03-06 v1

Abstract

Real-world sequential decision making is characterized by sparse rewards and large decision spaces, posing significant difficulty for experiential learning systems like tabula rasa\textit{tabula rasa} reinforcement learning (RL) agents. Large Language Models (LLMs), with a wealth of world knowledge, can help RL agents learn quickly and adapt to distribution shifts. In this work, we introduce Language Guided Exploration (LGE) framework, which uses a pre-trained language model (called GUIDE ) to provide decision-level guidance to an RL agent (called EXPLORER). We observe that on ScienceWorld (Wang et al.,2022), a challenging text environment, LGE outperforms vanilla RL agents significantly and also outperforms other sophisticated methods like Behaviour Cloning and Text Decision Transformer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2403.03141,
  title  = {Language Guided Exploration for RL Agents in Text Environments},
  author = {Hitesh Golchha and Sahil Yerawar and Dhruvesh Patel and Soham Dan and Keerthiram Murugesan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.03141},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T15:10:04.942Z