We present lilGym, a new benchmark for language-conditioned reinforcement learning in visual environments. lilGym is based on 2,661 highly-compositional human-written natural language statements grounded in an interactive visual environment. We introduce a new approach for exact reward computation in every possible world state by annotating all statements with executable Python programs. Each statement is paired with multiple start states and reward functions to form thousands of distinct Markov Decision Processes of varying difficulty. We experiment with lilGym with different models and learning regimes. Our results and analysis show that while existing methods are able to achieve non-trivial performance, lilGym forms a challenging open problem. lilGym is available at https://lil.nlp.cornell.edu/lilgym/.
Imitation learning algorithms provide state-of-the-art results on many structured prediction tasks by learning near-optimal search policies. Such algorithms assume training-time access to an expert that can provide the optimal action at any queried state; unfortunately, the number of such queries is often prohibitive, frequently rendering these approaches impractical. To combat this query complexity, we consider an active learning setting in which the learning algorithm has additional access to a much cheaper noisy heuristic that provides noisy guidance. Our algorithm, LEAQI, learns a difference classifier that predicts when the expert is likely to disagree with the heuristic, and queries the expert only when necessary. We apply LEAQI to three sequence labelling tasks, demonstrating significantly fewer queries to the expert and comparable (or better) accuracies over a passive approach.
Standard sequential generation methods assume a pre-specified generation order, such as text generation methods which generate words from left to right. In this work, we propose a framework for training models of text generation that operate in non-monotonic orders; the model directly learns good orders, without any additional annotation. Our framework operates by generating a word at an arbitrary position, and then recursively generating words to its left and then words to its right, yielding a binary tree. Learning is framed as imitation learning, including a coaching method which moves from imitating an oracle to reinforcing the policy’s own preferences. Experimental results demonstrate that using the proposed method, it is possible to learn policies which generate text without pre-specifying a generation order while achieving competitive performance with conventional left-to-right generation.