让智能体按需选择语言指令,提升复杂任务中的强化学习效率。
Select-to-Act: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Language Guidance

- 将指令拆解为可动态选择的语义片段,分阶段提供引导。
- 在RTFM基准上超越强基线,显著提升决策效果。
- 适合需要多阶段语言指导的复杂任务场景。
强化学习广泛应用于序列决策,但常因与环境交互成本高而导致样本效率低下。少数近期工作尝试通过自然语言指令引入外部知识来提升效率,但现有方法通常将整条指令作为单一输入,忽略了语言引导在不同阶段的差异性,尤其在复杂环境中表现不足。本文提出层次化强化学习框架HRLLI,将自然语言指令显式建模为决策过程中可动态选择的语义引导。该框架将指令分解为若干分段式引导元素,每个片段在环境交互的不同阶段可能变得相关。采用新颖的‘选-执行’(Select-to-Act)两级策略结构:高层语义策略作为引导选择器,根据当前状态选取最相关的指令片段,指导低层智能体决策;低层策略则基于所选引导执行环境动作。两个层级策略同步优化以最大化交互带来的增强期望回报。该设计使智能体能在交互中自适应地将语言指令映射到阶段特定决策。在指令密集型的RTFM基准上的实验表明,HRLLI持续优于多个强基线,证明显式建模自适应指令选择能显著提升强化学习的有效性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been widely applied to sequential decision-making, yet it often suffers from poor sample efficiency due to costly interactions with the environment. A limited line of recent work has started exploring improving RL efficiency by leveraging external knowledge expressed in natural-language instructions. However, the few existing approaches typically treat the entire instruction as a single conditioning input, failing to account for the stage-dependent nature of language guidance, especially in complex environments. In this paper, we propose \emph{Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning with Language Instructions (HRLLI)}, a hierarchical RL framework that explicitly models natural-language instructions as dynamically selectable semantic guidance during decision-making. HRLLI decomposes instructions into a set of piecewise guidance elements, where each instruction piece may become relevant at different stages of interaction with the environment. A novel hierarchical RL policy structure is then formulated in a \emph{Select-to-Act} paradigm: a high-level semantic policy acts as a guidance selector that selects the most relevant instruction piece to the current state to guide the low-level agent's decision, while a low-level policy executes environment actions conditioned on the selected guidance. The two-level policies are learned simultaneously to maximize augmented expected returns from interactions with the environment. This design enables the agent to adaptively ground language instructions into stage-specific decisions during interaction. Experiments on the instruction-intensive RTFM benchmark show that HRLLI consistently outperforms strong instruction-conditioned RL baselines, demonstrating that explicitly modeling adaptive instruction selection significantly improves the effectiveness of RL.
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