Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure
This work addresses the problem of advancing language-based AI agents for researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing testbeds without introducing a new method.
The authors tackled the challenge of developing language-based autonomous agents by proposing Interactive Fiction games as a testbed, and they introduced Jericho, a learning environment for these games, conducting a study that highlights areas for agent improvement.
A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to understand and communicate with language. Interactive Fiction games are fully text-based simulation environments where a player issues text commands to effect change in the environment and progress through the story. We argue that IF games are an excellent testbed for studying language-based autonomous agents. In particular, IF games combine challenges of combinatorial action spaces, language understanding, and commonsense reasoning. To facilitate rapid development of language-based agents, we introduce Jericho, a learning environment for man-made IF games and conduct a comprehensive study of text-agents across a rich set of games, highlighting directions in which agents can improve.