TextWorldExpress: Simulating Text Games at One Million Steps Per Second

Text-based games offer a challenging test bed to evaluate virtual agents at language understanding, multi-step problem-solving, and common-sense reasoning. However, speed is a major limitation of current text-based games, capping at 300 steps per second, mainly due to the use of legacy tooling. In t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Jansen, Peter A, Marc-Alexandre Côté
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 02.03.2023
Subjects
Games
Tooling
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Summary:Text-based games offer a challenging test bed to evaluate virtual agents at language understanding, multi-step problem-solving, and common-sense reasoning. However, speed is a major limitation of current text-based games, capping at 300 steps per second, mainly due to the use of legacy tooling. In this work we present TextWorldExpress, a high-performance simulator that includes implementations of three common text game benchmarks that increases simulation throughput by approximately three orders of magnitude, reaching over one million steps per second on common desktop hardware. This significantly reduces experiment runtime, enabling billion-step-scale experiments in about one day.
ISSN:2331-8422