用大模型生成子目标,让智能体在稀疏奖励下更快学会复杂任务。
Words as Beacons: Guiding RL Agents with High-Level Language Prompts
- 大模型作为教师分解任务为位置、物体和语言指令三类子目标
- 在MiniGrid上训练速度比基线快30至200倍,显著提升探索效率
- 仅训练时调用大模型,部署时无需依赖,适合实际应用
强化学习中的稀疏奖励环境极大挑战探索能力,常导致学习效率低下或失败。本文提出一种教师-学生强化学习框架,利用大语言模型(LLMs)作为“教师”,根据环境的文本描述将复杂任务分解为子目标。由于具备理解环境结构与目的的能力,LLM可像人类一样生成子目标,包括相对位置目标、物体表征及直接生成的语言指令。更重要的是,我们证明只需在训练阶段查询LLM,智能体即可在无外部干预下完成任务。我们在MiniGrid基准的多种程序化生成环境中评估了三种主流开源大模型(Llama、DeepSeek、Qwen)的表现。实验表明,该基于课程的学习方法显著加速了学习进程,在复杂任务中实现最多达200倍的训练步数缩减,相较近期针对稀疏奖励设计的基线模型有明显优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Sparse reward environments in reinforcement learning (RL) pose significant challenges for exploration, often leading to inefficient or incomplete learning processes. To tackle this issue, this work proposes a teacher-student RL framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as "teachers" to guide the agent's learning process by decomposing complex tasks into subgoals. Due to their inherent capability to understand RL environments based on a textual description of structure and purpose, LLMs can provide subgoals to accomplish the task defined for the environment in a similar fashion to how a human would do. In doing so, three types of subgoals are proposed: positional targets relative to the agent, object representations, and language-based instructions generated directly by the LLM. More importantly, we show that it is possible to query the LLM only during the training phase, enabling agents to operate within the environment without any LLM intervention. We assess the performance of this proposed framework by evaluating three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs (Llama, DeepSeek, Qwen) eliciting subgoals across various procedurally generated environment of the MiniGrid benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate that this curriculum-based approach accelerates learning and enhances exploration in complex tasks, achieving up to 30 to 200 times faster convergence in training steps compared to recent baselines designed for sparse reward environments.
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