While large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly deployed across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision-making, their impressive performance is largely due to the comprehensive and in-depth domain knowledge embedded within them. However, the extent of this knowledge can vary across different domains. Existing methods often assume that LLMs already possess such comprehensive and in-depth knowledge of their environment, overlooking potential gaps in their understanding of actual world dynamics. To address this gap, we introduce Discover, Verify, and Evolve (DiVE), a framework that discovers world dynamics from a small number of demonstrations, verifies the correctness of these dynamics, and evolves new, advanced dynamics tailored to the current situation. Through extensive evaluations, we analyze the impact of each component on performance and compare the automatically generated dynamics from DiVE with human-annotated world dynamics. Our results demonstrate that LLMs guided by DiVE can make better decisions, achieving rewards comparable to human players in the Crafter environment.

Recent SOTA approaches for embodied learning via interaction directly employ large language models (LLMs) as agents to determine the next steps in an environment. Due to their world knowledge and reasoning capabilities, LLM agents achieve stronger performance than previous smaller agents based on reinforcement learning (RL); however, frequently calling LLMs is slow and expensive. Instead of directly employing LLMs as agents, can we use LLMs' reasoning capabilities to adaptively create training environments to help smaller RL agents learn useful skills that they are weak at? We propose EnvGen, a novel framework to address this question. We first prompt an LLM to generate training environments by giving it the task description and simulator objectives that the agents should learn and then asking it to generate a set of environment configurations (e.g., different terrains, items initially given to agents, etc.). Next, we train a small RL agent in a mixture of the original and LLM-generated environments. Then, we enable the LLM to continuously adapt the generated environments to progressively improve the skills that the agent is weak at, by providing feedback to the LLM in the form of the agent's performance. We demonstrate the usefulness of EnvGen with comprehensive experiments in Crafter and Heist environments. We find that a small RL agent trained with EnvGen can outperform SOTA methods, including a GPT-4 agent, and learns long-horizon tasks significantly faster. We also show that using an LLM to adapt environments dynamically outperforms curriculum learning approaches and how the environments are adapted to help improve RL agents' weaker skills over time. Additionally, EnvGen is substantially more efficient as it only uses a small number of LLM calls (e.g., 4 in total), whereas LLM agents require thousands of calls. Lastly, we present detailed ablation studies for EnvGen design choices.

We propose Structured Exploration with Achievements (SEA), a multi-stage reinforcement learning algorithm designed for achievement-based environments, a particular type of environment with an internal achievement set. SEA first uses offline data to learn a representation of the known achievements with a determinant loss function, then recovers the dependency graph of the learned achievements with a heuristic algorithm, and finally interacts with the environment online to learn policies that master known achievements and explore new ones with a controller built with the recovered dependency graph. We empirically demonstrate that SEA can recover the achievement structure accurately and improve exploration in hard domains such as Crafter that are procedurally generated with high-dimensional observations like images.