EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement
  Learning
Kinjal Basu Keerthiram Murugesan Subhajit Chaudhury Murray Campbell Kartik Talamadupula Tim Klinger
Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as an important collection of NLP tasks,
requiring reinforcement learning (RL) agents to combine natural language
understanding with reasoning. A key challenge for agents attempting to solve
such tasks is to generalize across multiple games and demonstrate good
performance on both seen and unseen objects. Purely deep-RL-based approaches
may perform well on seen objects; however, they fail to showcase the same
performance on unseen objects. Commonsense-infused deep-RL agents may work
better on unseen data; unfortunately, their policies are often not
interpretable or easily transferable. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we
present EXPLORER which is an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual
reinforcement learning. EXPLORER is neurosymbolic in nature, as it relies on a
neural module for exploration and a symbolic module for exploitation. It can
also learn generalized symbolic policies and perform well over unseen data. Our
experiments show that EXPLORER outperforms the baseline agents on Text-World
cooking (TW-Cooking) and Text-World Commonsense (TWC) games.