SPRING: GPT-4 Out-performs RL Algorithms by Studying Papers and
  Reasoning
Authors: name: Yue Wu; name: So Yeon Min; name: Shrimai Prabhumoye; name: Yonatan Bisk; name: Ruslan Salakhutdinov; name: Amos Azaria; name: Tom Mitchell; name: Yuanzhi Li
Published: 2023-05-24 18:14:35

Abstract: Open-world survival games pose significant challenges for AI algorithms due
to their multi-tasking, deep exploration, and goal prioritization requirements.
Despite reinforcement learning (RL) being popular for solving games, its high
sample complexity limits its effectiveness in complex open-world games like
Crafter or Minecraft. We propose a novel approach, SPRING, to read the game's
original academic paper and use the knowledge learned to reason and play the
game through a large language model (LLM). Prompted with the LaTeX source as
game context and a description of the agent's current observation, our SPRING
framework employs a directed acyclic graph (DAG) with game-related questions as
nodes and dependencies as edges. We identify the optimal action to take in the
environment by traversing the DAG and calculating LLM responses for each node
in topological order, with the LLM's answer to final node directly translating
to environment actions. In our experiments, we study the quality of in-context
"reasoning" induced by different forms of prompts under the setting of the
Crafter open-world environment. Our experiments suggest that LLMs, when
prompted with consistent chain-of-thought, have great potential in completing
sophisticated high-level trajectories. Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4
outperforms all state-of-the-art RL baselines, trained for 1M steps, without
any training. Finally, we show the potential of games as a test bed for LLMs.