Monte-Carlo Planning and Learning with Language Action Value Estimates

Interactive Fiction (IF) games provide a useful testbed for language-based reinforcement learning agents, posing significant challenges of natural language understanding, commonsense reasoning, and non-myopic planning in the combinatorial search space. Agents based on standard planning algorithms struggle to play IF games due to the massive search space of language actions. Thus, language-grounded planning is a key ability of such agents, since inferring the consequence of language action based on semantic understanding can drastically improve search. In this paper, we introduce Monte-Carlo planning with Language Action Value Estimates (MC-LAVE) that combines a Monte-Carlo tree search with language-driven exploration. MC-LAVE invests more search effort into semantically promising language actions using locally optimistic language value estimates, yielding a significant reduction in the effective search space of language actions. We then present a reinforcement learning approach via MC-LAVE, which alternates between MC-LAVE planning and supervised learning of the self-generated language actions. In the experiments, we demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the extensive set of IF games.