arXiv AI By Muhammad U. Nasir, Alex Vogt, Steven D. James, Julian Togelius

State Trace Rationale As Auxiliary Task in Reinforcement Learning

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The paper introduces STRAT, an auxiliary task for deep reinforcement learning that trains agents to generate a short textual trace describing their state. This trace, produced online by environment rules, includes landmark, route, and survey information such as position, inventory, goals, and progress. Adding a single auxiliary head to a standard policy, STRAT improves performance on 60 sparse-reward XLand-MiniGrid tasks, compacting state representations, preventing rank collapse, and offering a readable account of agent beliefs at no extra cost.

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