Natural Language State Representation for Reinforcement Learning

Erez Schwartz, Guy Tennenholtz, Chen Tessler, Shie Mannor

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Natural Language, Representation Learning, Deep Learning

Abstract: Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning have highlighted the difficulties in learning within complex high dimensional domains. We argue that one of the main reasons that current approaches do not perform well, is that the information is represented sub-optimally. A natural way to describe what we observe, is through natural language. In this paper, we implement a natural language state representation to learn and complete tasks. Our experiments suggest that natural language based agents are more robust, converge faster and perform better than vision based agents, showing the benefit of using natural language representations for Reinforcement Learning.

Code: https://github.com/anon-rl-iclr2020/paper_submission-