Deep reinforcement learning agents often struggle when tasks require understanding both vision and language. Conventional architectures typically isolate perception (for example, CNN-based visual encoders) from decision-making (policy networks). This separation can be inefficient, since the policy's failures do not directly help the perception module learn what is important. To address this, we implement the Perception-Decision Interleaving Transformer (PDiT) architecture introduced by Mao et al. (2023), a model that alternates between perception and decision layers within a single transformer. This interleaving allows feedback from decision-making to refine perceptual features dynamically. In addition, we integrate a contrastive loss inspired by CLIP to align textual mission embeddings with visual scene features. We evaluate the PDiT encoders on the BabyAI GoToLocal environment and find that the approach achieves more stable rewards and stronger alignment compared to a standard PPO baseline. The results suggest that interleaved transformer encoders are a promising direction for developing more integrated autonomous agents.

Designing better deep networks and better reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are both important for deep RL. This work studies the former. Specifically, the Perception and Decision-making Interleaving Transformer (PDiT) network is proposed, which cascades two Transformers in a very natural way: the perceiving one focuses on \emph{the environmental perception} by processing the observation at the patch level, whereas the deciding one pays attention to \emph{the decision-making} by conditioning on the history of the desired returns, the perceiver's outputs, and the actions. Such a network design is generally applicable to a lot of deep RL settings, e.g., both the online and offline RL algorithms under environments with either image observations, proprioception observations, or hybrid image-language observations. Extensive experiments show that PDiT can not only achieve superior performance than strong baselines in different settings but also extract explainable feature representations. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/maohangyu/PDiT}.