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Explorer: Exploration-Guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning (arxiv.org)
25 points by PaulHoule on Mar 24, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A game-playing agent for text adventures uses a neural part to explore and a symbolic rule-based part to act, so the strategies it learns are readable and reusable. It beat baseline agents on two text-game sets, including on objects it had never seen.

Abstract · EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning

Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as an important collection of NLP tasks, requiring reinforcement learning (RL) agents to combine natural language understanding with reasoning. A key challenge for agents attempting to solve such tasks is to generalize across multiple games and demonstrate good performance on both seen and unseen objects. Purely deep-RL-based approaches may perform well on seen objects; however, they fail to showcase the same performance on unseen objects. Commonsense-infused deep-RL agents may work better on unseen data; unfortunately, their policies are often not interpretable or easily transferable. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present EXPLORER which is an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual reinforcement learning. EXPLORER is neurosymbolic in nature, as it relies on a neural module for exploration and a symbolic module for exploitation. It can also learn generalized symbolic policies and perform well over unseen data. Our experiments show that EXPLORER outperforms the baseline agents on Text-World cooking (TW-Cooking) and Text-World Commonsense (TWC) games.

Kinjal Basu, Keerthiram Murugesan, Subhajit Chaudhury, Murray Campbell, Kartik Talamadupula, Tim Klinger
arXiv:2403.10692 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LO · submitted Mar 15, 2024
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Cool! I was also working on a prototype that uses text-based reinforcement learning techniques. This has a different use-case, but good to read anyway.