Knowledgeable Agents by Offline Reinforcement Learning from Large Language Model Rollouts

Reinforcement learning (RL) trains agents to accomplish complex tasks through environmental interaction data, but its capacity is also limited by the scope of the available data. To obtain a knowledgeable agent, a promising approach is to leverage the knowledge from large language models (LLMs). Despite previous studies combining LLMs with RL, seamless integration of the two components remains challenging due to their semantic gap. This paper introduces a novel method, Knowledgeable Agents from Language Model Rollouts (KALM), which extracts knowledge from LLMs in the form of imaginary rollouts that can be easily learned by the agent through offline reinforcement learning methods. The primary challenge of KALM lies in LLM grounding, as LLMs are inherently limited to textual data, whereas environmental data often comprise numerical vectors unseen to LLMs. To address this, KALM fine-tunes the LLM to perform various tasks based on environmental data, including bidirectional translation between natural language descriptions of skills and their corresponding rollout data. This grounding process enhances the LLM's comprehension of environmental dynamics, enabling it to generate diverse and meaningful imaginary rollouts that reflect novel skills. Initial empirical evaluations on the CLEVR-Robot environment demonstrate that KALM enables agents to complete complex rephrasings of task goals and extend their capabilities to novel tasks requiring unprecedented optimal behaviors. KALM achieves a success rate of 46% in executing tasks with unseen goals, substantially surpassing the 26% success rate achieved by baseline methods. Furthermore, KALM effectively enables the LLM to comprehend environmental dynamics, resulting in the generation of meaningful imaginary rollouts that reflect novel skills and demonstrate the seamless integration of large language models and reinforcement learning.

Context-based Fast Recommendation Strategy for Long User Behavior Sequence in Meituan Waimai

In the recommender system of Meituan Waimai, we are dealing with ever-lengthening user behavior sequences, which pose an increasing challenge to modeling user preference effectively. Existing sequential recommendation models often fail to capture long-term dependencies or are too complex, complicating the fulfillment of Meituan Waimai's unique business needs. To better model user interests, we consider selecting relevant sub-sequences from users' extensive historical behaviors based on their preferences. In this specific scenario, we've noticed that the contexts in which users interact have a significant impact on their preferences. For this purpose, we introduce a novel method called Context-based Fast Recommendation Strategy to tackle the issue of long sequences. We first identify contexts that share similar user preferences with the target context and then locate the corresponding PoIs based on these identified contexts. This approach eliminates the necessity to select a sub-sequence for every candidate PoI, thereby avoiding high time complexity. Specifically, we implement a prototype-based approach to pinpoint contexts that mirror similar user preferences. To amplify accuracy and interpretability, we employ JS divergence of PoI attributes such as categories and prices as a measure of similarity between contexts. A temporal graph integrating both prototype and context nodes helps incorporate temporal information. We then identify appropriate prototypes considering both target contexts and short-term user preferences. Following this, we utilize contexts aligned with these prototypes to generate a sub-sequence, aimed at predicting CTR and CTCVR scores with target attention. Since its inception in 2023, this strategy has been adopted in Meituan Waimai's display recommender system, leading to a 4.6% surge in CTR and a 4.2% boost in GMV.

CartoMark: a benchmark dataset for map pattern recognition and 1 map content retrieval with machine intelligence

Maps are fundamental medium to visualize and represent the real word in a simple and 16 philosophical way. The emergence of the 3rd wave information has made a proportion of maps are available to be generated ubiquitously, which would significantly enrich the dimensions and perspectives to understand the characteristics of the real world. However, a majority of map dataset have never been discovered, acquired and effectively used, and the map data used in many applications might not be completely fitted for the authentic demands of these applications. This challenge is emerged due to the lack of numerous well-labelled benchmark datasets for implementing the deep learning approaches into identifying complicated map content. Thus, we develop a large-scale benchmark dataset that includes well-labelled dataset for map text annotation recognition, map scene classification, map super-resolution reconstruction, and map style transferring. Furthermore, these well-labelled datasets would facilitate the state-of-the-art machine intelligence technologies to conduct map feature detection, map pattern recognition and map content retrieval. We hope our efforts would be useful for AI-enhanced cartographical applications.

Language Model Self-improvement by Reinforcement Learning Contemplation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable performance across various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, fine-tuning these models often necessitates substantial supervision, which can be expensive and time-consuming to obtain. This paper introduces a novel unsupervised method called LanguageModel Self-Improvement by Reinforcement Learning Contemplation (SIRLC) that improves LLMs without reliance on external labels. Our approach is grounded in the observation that it is simpler for language models to assess text quality than to generate text. Building on this insight, SIRLC assigns LLMs dual roles as both student and teacher. As a student, the LLM generates answers to unlabeled questions, while as a teacher, it evaluates the generated text and assigns scores accordingly. The model parameters are updated using reinforcement learning to maximize the evaluation score. We demonstrate that SIRLC can be applied to various NLP tasks, such as reasoning problems, text generation, and machine translation. Our experiments show that SIRLC effectively improves LLM performance without external supervision, resulting in a 5.6% increase in answering accuracy for reasoning tasks and a rise in BERTScore from 0.82 to 0.86 for translation tasks. Furthermore, SIRLC can be applied to models of different sizes, showcasing its broad applicability.