{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/grounding-language-to-entities-and-dynamics","title":"Grounding Language to Entities and Dynamics for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning","arxiv_id":"2101.07393","date":"2021-01-19","proceeding":null,"authors":["Austin W. Hanjie","Victor Zhong","Karthik Narasimhan"],"abstract":"We investigate the use of natural language to drive the generalization of control policies and introduce the new multi-task environment Messenger with free-form text manuals describing the environment dynamics. Unlike previous work, Messenger does not assume prior knowledge connecting text and state observations $-$ the control policy must simultaneously ground the game manual to entity symbols and dynamics in the environment. We develop a new model, EMMA (Entity Mapper with Multi-modal Attention) which uses an entity-conditioned attention module that allows for selective focus over relevant descriptions in the manual for each entity in the environment. EMMA is end-to-end differentiable and learns a latent grounding of entities and dynamics from text to observations using only environment rewards. EMMA achieves successful zero-shot generalization to unseen games with new dynamics, obtaining a 40% higher win rate compared to multiple baselines. However, win rate on the hardest stage of Messenger remains low (10%), demonstrating the need for additional work in this direction.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.07393v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07393v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"grounding-language-to-entities-and-dynamics","repo_url":"https://github.com/ahjwang/messenger-emma","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"zero-shot-generalization","task_name":"Zero-shot Generalization"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2101.07393","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2101.07393","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}