mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

A Survey of Text Games for Reinforcement Learning informed by Natural Language

arXiv 2109.09478 ↗First posted 20 Sep 2021cs.AIcited by 14

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Abstract (arXiv)

Reinforcement Learning has shown success in a number of complex virtual environments. However, many challenges still exist towards solving problems with natural language as a core component. Interactive Fiction Games (or Text Games) are one such problem type that offer a set of partially observable environments where natural language is required as part of the reinforcement learning solutions. Therefore, this survey's aim is to assist in the development of new Text Game problem settings and solutions for Reinforcement Learning informed by natural language. Specifically, this survey summarises: 1) the challenges introduced in Text Game Reinforcement Learning problems, 2) the generation tools for evaluating Text Games and the subsequent environments generated and, 3) the agent architectures currently applied are compared to provide a systematic review of benchmark methodologies and opportunities for future researchers.

Key facts. Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 41 of its 53 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 20 Sep 2021.

Builds on

41 of 53 references.

References · 41

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29 more
  1. 2019Learning to Speak and Act in a Fantasy Text Adventure Gamecited by 122
  2. 2020Keep CALM and Explore: Language Models for Action Generation in Text-based Gamescited by 108
  3. 2015Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Natural Language Action Spacecited by 88
  4. 2020Graph Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Natural Language Action Spacescited by 80
  5. 2018Learn What Not to Learn: Action Elimination with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 77
  6. 2015Language Understanding for Text-based Games Using Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 70
  7. 2018Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 53
  8. 2020Learning Dynamic Belief Graphs to Generalize on Text-Based Gamescited by 49
  9. 2020How to Avoid Being Eaten by a Grue: Structured Exploration Strategies for Textual Worldscited by 38
  10. 2020Text-based RL Agents with Commonsense Knowledge: New Challenges, Environments and Baselinescited by 37
  11. 2018Counting to Explore and Generalize in Text-based Gamescited by 36
  12. 2020How to Motivate Your Dragon: Teaching Goal-Driven Agents to Speak and Act in Fantasy Worldscited by 35
  13. 2020Interactive Fiction Game Playing as Multi-Paragraph Reading Comprehension with Reinforcement Learningcited by 27
  14. 2020Deep Reinforcement Learning with Stacked Hierarchical Attention for Text-based Gamescited by 22
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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2022: 3; 2023: 3; 2024: 1; 2025: 6; 2026: 1.

14 papers.

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  1. 2023AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agentscited by 1,211
  2. 2023Introspective Tips: Large Language Model for In-Context Decision Makingcited by 28
  3. 2022Multi-Stage Episodic Control for Strategic Exploration in Text Gamescited by 22
  4. 2025Monte Carlo Planning with Large Language Model for Text-Based Game Agentscited by 22
  5. 2022TextWorldExpress: Simulating Text Games at One Million Steps Per Secondcited by 12
  6. 2022Behavior Cloned Transformers are Neurosymbolic Reasonerscited by 10
  7. 2025TALES: Text Adventure Learning Environment Suitecited by 9
  8. 2023Conceptual Reinforcement Learning for Language-Conditioned Taskscited by 8
  9. 2025Digital Player: Evaluating Large Language Models based Human-like Agent in Gamescited by 6
  10. 2025A Generalist Hanabi Agentcited by 5
  11. 2024A Survey on Complex Tasks for Goal-Directed Interactive Agentscited by 2
  12. 2025Learning Natural Language Constraints for Safe Reinforcement Learning of Language Agentscited by 2
2 more
  1. 2026Utilizing and Calibrating Hindsight Process Rewards via Reinforcement with Mutual Information Self-Evaluationcited by 1
  2. 2025elsciRL: Integrating Language Solutions into Reinforcement Learning Problem Settingscited by 0