Papers › Fire Burns, Sword Cuts: Commonsense Inductive Bias for Exploration in Text-based Games

Fire Burns, Sword Cuts: Commonsense Inductive Bias for Exploration in Text-based Games

1 May 2022ACL 2022 5archive 2025-07-28

Dongwon Ryu, Ehsan Shareghi, Meng Fang, Yunqiu Xu, Shirui Pan, Reza Haf

Text-based games (TGs) are exciting testbeds for developing deep reinforcement learning techniques due to their partially observed environments and large action spaces. In these games, the agent learns to explore the environment via natural language interactions with the game simulator. A fundamental challenge in TGs is the efficient exploration of the large action space when the agent has not yet acquired enough knowledge about the environment. We propose CommExpl, an exploration technique that injects external commonsense knowledge, via a pretrained language model (LM), into the agent during training when the agent is the most uncertain about its next action. Our method exhibits improvement on the collected game scores during the training in four out of nine games from Jericho. Additionally, the produced trajectory of actions exhibit lower perplexity, when tested with a pretrained LM, indicating better closeness to human language.

PaperPDFCode

Code

ktr0921/comm-expl-kg-a2c officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Deep Reinforcement LearningEfficient ExplorationInductive BiasLanguage ModelingLanguage Modellingtext-based games

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections