text-based games

Description from the archive archive 2025-07-28.

Benchmarks archive 2025-07-28

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Libraries

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Datasets archive 2025-07-28

4 datasets whose archive record lists this task, ordered by the archive's paper count.

Subtasks archive 2025-07-28

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Most implemented papers archive 2025-07-28

30 shown of 36 papers with code (75 tagged with this task in all), ordered by repositories listed in the archive, not by stars (the archive holds no stars, so PwC's “Social” and “Latest” sorts cannot be reproduced). Papers without a page here are shown as plain text.

• Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Natural Language Action Space
  14 Nov 2015 3 repositories listed
  This paper introduces a novel architecture for reinforcement learning with deep neural networks designed to handle state and action spaces characterized by natural language, as found in text-based games.
• Language Understanding for Text-based Games Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
  30 Jun 2015 3 repositories listed
  We evaluate our approach on two game worlds, comparing against baselines using bag-of-words and bag-of-bigrams for state representations.
• TextGames: Learning to Self-Play Text-Based Puzzle Games via Language Model Reasoning
  25 Feb 2025 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 2 of 3 samples · 1 unverified · 3 pointer-only (licence)
  Reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to comprehend, analyze, and solve complex problems.
• Constructing Temporal Dynamic Knowledge Graphs from Interactive Text-based Games
  3 Nov 2023 2 repositories listed
  In order to address DGU's weaknesses while preserving its high interpretability, we propose the Temporal Discrete Graph Updater (TDGU), a novel neural network model that represents dynamic knowledge graphs as a sequence…
• TextWorldExpress: Simulating Text Games at One Million Steps Per Second
  1 Aug 2022 2 repositories listed
  Text-based games offer a challenging test bed to evaluate virtual agents at language understanding, multi-step problem-solving, and common-sense reasoning.
• Text-based RL Agents with Commonsense Knowledge: New Challenges, Environments and Baselines
  8 Oct 2020 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 0 of 13 samples · 13 unverified
  Text-based games have emerged as an important test-bed for Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, requiring RL agents to combine grounded language understanding with sequential decision making.
• Counting to Explore and Generalize in Text-based Games
  29 Jun 2018 2 repositories listed Syntology ran 1 of 1 samples · 0 unverified
  We propose a recurrent RL agent with an episodic exploration mechanism that helps discovering good policies in text-based game environments.
• Using reinforcement learning to learn how to play text-based games
  6 Jan 2018 2 repositories listed
  The ability to learn optimal control policies in systems where action space is defined by sentences in natural language would allow many interesting real-world applications such as automatic optimisation of dialogue…
• SituatedThinker: Grounding LLM Reasoning with Real-World through Situated Thinking
  25 May 2025 1 repository listed
  By utilizing reinforcement learning, SituatedThinker incentivizes deliberate reasoning with the real world to acquire information and feedback, allowing LLMs to surpass their knowledge boundaries and enhance reasoning.
• TextArena
  15 Apr 2025 1 repository listed Syntology ran 0 of 7 samples · 7 unverified
  TextArena is an open-source collection of competitive text-based games for training and evaluation of agentic behavior in Large Language Models (LLMs).
• Persona Dynamics: Unveiling the Impact of Personality Traits on Agents in Text-Based Games
  9 Apr 2025 1 repository listed
  Artificial agents are increasingly central to complex interactions and decision-making tasks, yet aligning their behaviors with desired human values remains an open challenge.
• STARLING: Self-supervised Training of Text-based Reinforcement Learning Agent with Large Language Models
  9 Jun 2024 1 repository listed
  In this work, we introduce an interactive environment for self-supervised RL, STARLING, for text-based games that bootstraps the text-based RL agents with automatically generated games (based on the seed set of game…
• EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning
  15 Mar 2024 1 repository listed
  To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present EXPLORER which is an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual reinforcement learning.
• Large Language Models Are Neurosymbolic Reasoners
  17 Jan 2024 1 repository listed Syntology ran 3 of 3 samples · 0 unverified · 3 pointer-only (licence)
  A wide range of real-world applications is characterized by their symbolic nature, necessitating a strong capability for symbolic reasoning.
• ScriptWorld: Text Based Environment For Learning Procedural Knowledge
  8 Jul 2023 1 repository listed
  Text-based games provide a framework for developing natural language understanding and commonsense knowledge about the world in reinforcement learning based agents.
• ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games
  24 May 2023 1 repository listed Syntology ran 0 of 8 samples · 8 unverified
  In this work, we investigate the capacity of language models to generate explicit, interpretable, and interactive world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks.
• A Minimal Approach for Natural Language Action Space in Text-based Games
  6 May 2023 1 repository listed
  Text-based games (TGs) are language-based interactive environments for reinforcement learning.
• Learn What Is Possible, Then Choose What Is Best: Disentangling One-To-Many Relations in Language Through Text-based Games
  14 Apr 2023 1 repository listed
  Language models pre-trained on large self-supervised corpora, followed by task-specific fine-tuning has become the dominant paradigm in NLP.
• Learning to Play Text-based Adventure Games with Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning
  21 Feb 2023 1 repository listed
  To deal with sparse extrinsic rewards from the environment, we combine it with a potential-based reward shaping technique to provide more informative (dense) reward signals to the RL agent.
• DiffG-RL: Leveraging Difference between State and Common Sense
  29 Nov 2022 1 repository listed
  We propose a novel agent, DiffG-RL, which constructs a Difference Graph that organizes the environment states and common sense by means of interactive objects with a dedicated graph encoder.
• Learning to Follow Instructions in Text-Based Games
  8 Nov 2022 1 repository listed Syntology ran 1 of 1 samples · 0 unverified · 1 pointer-only (licence)
  Text-based games present a unique class of sequential decision making problem in which agents interact with a partially observable, simulated environment via actions and observations conveyed through natural language.
• Fire Burns, Sword Cuts: Commonsense Inductive Bias for Exploration in Text-based Games
  1 May 2022 1 repository listed
  Text-based games (TGs) are exciting testbeds for developing deep reinforcement learning techniques due to their partially observed environments and large action spaces.
• Perceiving the World: Question-guided Reinforcement Learning for Text-based Games
  20 Mar 2022 1 repository listed
  Text-based games provide an interactive way to study natural language processing.
• Neuro-Symbolic Approaches for Text-Based Policy Learning
  1 Nov 2021 1 repository listed
  We outline a method for end-to-end differentiable symbolic rule learning and show that such symbolic policies outperform previous state-of-the-art methods in text-based RL for the coin collector environment from 5-10x…
• LOA: Logical Optimal Actions for Text-based Interaction Games
  21 Oct 2021 1 repository listed
  We present Logical Optimal Actions (LOA), an action decision architecture of reinforcement learning applications with a neuro-symbolic framework which is a combination of neural network and symbolic knowledge…
• Generalization in Text-based Games via Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
  21 Sep 2021 1 repository listed Syntology ran 1 of 1 samples · 0 unverified
  Deep reinforcement learning provides a promising approach for text-based games in studying natural language communication between humans and artificial agents.
• Pre-trained Language Models as Prior Knowledge for Playing Text-based Games
  18 Jul 2021 1 repository listed
  Given the sample-inefficiency of RL approaches, it is inefficient to learn rich enough textual representations to be able to understand and reason using the textual observation in such a complicated game environment…
• Deep Reinforcement Learning with Stacked Hierarchical Attention for Text-based Games
  22 Oct 2020 1 repository listed Syntology ran 2 of 2 samples · 0 unverified
  We study reinforcement learning (RL) for text-based games, which are interactive simulations in the context of natural language.
• Keep CALM and Explore: Language Models for Action Generation in Text-based Games
  6 Oct 2020 1 repository listed
  In this paper, we propose the Contextual Action Language Model (CALM) to generate a compact set of action candidates at each game state.
• Bootstrapped Q-learning with Context Relevant Observation Pruning to Generalize in Text-based Games
  24 Sep 2020 1 repository listed
  Our bootstrapped agent shows improved generalization in solving unseen TextWorld games, using 10x-20x fewer training games compared to previous state-of-the-art methods despite requiring less number of training episodes.

Syntology lines on 9 of the papers shown; no Syntology record for the others (a paper without an arXiv id cannot be joined to the graph, and absence from the graph layer is not a recorded non-run). “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized fixture, not that the paper's result was reproduced. Read from the graph 2026-09-24.