Learning Symbolic Rules over Abstract Meaning Representations for Textual Reinforcement Learning

Subhajit Chaudhury, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Daiki Kimura, Prithviraj Sen, Keerthiram Murugesan, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Michiaki Tatsubori, Achille Fokoue, Pavan Kapanipathi, Asim Munawar, Alexander Gray


Abstract
Text-based reinforcement learning agents have predominantly been neural network-based models with embeddings-based representation, learning uninterpretable policies that often do not generalize well to unseen games. On the other hand, neuro-symbolic methods, specifically those that leverage an intermediate formal representation, are gaining significant attention in language understanding tasks. This is because of their advantages ranging from inherent interpretability, the lesser requirement of training data, and being generalizable in scenarios with unseen data. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a modular, NEuro-Symbolic Textual Agent (NESTA) that combines a generic semantic parser with a rule induction system to learn abstract interpretable rules as policies. Our experiments on established text-based game benchmarks show that the proposed NESTA method outperforms deep reinforcement learning-based techniques by achieving better generalization to unseen test games and learning from fewer training interactions.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.373
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6764–6776
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.373
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.373
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Subhajit Chaudhury, Sarathkrishna Swaminathan, Daiki Kimura, Prithviraj Sen, Keerthiram Murugesan, Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Michiaki Tatsubori, Achille Fokoue, Pavan Kapanipathi, Asim Munawar, and Alexander Gray. 2023. Learning Symbolic Rules over Abstract Meaning Representations for Textual Reinforcement Learning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6764–6776, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning Symbolic Rules over Abstract Meaning Representations for Textual Reinforcement Learning (Chaudhury et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.373.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.373.mp4