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Past talk · AI/ML Seminar Series

Large Language Models as External Knowledge Sources for Sequential Decision Making

Kolby Nottingham

PhD Student, Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine

Date & time
Monday, February 6, 2023 · 1:00 PM
Location
Donald Bren Hall 4011

Abstract

While it's common for other machine learning modalities to benefit from model pretraining, reinforcement learning (RL) agents still typically learn tabula rasa. Large language models (LLMs), trained on internet text, have been used as external knowledge sources for RL, but on their own they are noisy and lack the grounding necessary to reason in interactive environments. In this talk, we will cover methods for grounding LLMs in environment dynamics and applying extracted knowledge to training RL agents. Finally, we will demonstrate our newly proposed method for applying LLMs to improving RL sample efficiency through guided exploration.

About the speaker

Kolby Nottingham is a PhD student at the University of California Irvine, co-advised by Professors Roy Fox and Sameer Singh. His research interests lie at the intersection of reinforcement learning and natural language processing.