Aligning Agents like Large Language Models

Training agents to act competently in complex 3D environments from high-dimensional visual information is challenging. Reinforcement learning is conventionally used to train such agents, but requires a carefully designed reward function, and is difficult to scale to obtain robust agents that generalize to new tasks. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressively general capabilities resulting from large-scale pre-training and post-training alignment, but struggle to act in complex environments. This position paper draws explicit analogies between decision-making agents and LLMs, and argues that agents should be trained like LLMs to achieve more general, robust, and aligned behaviors. We provide a proof-of-concept to demonstrate how the procedure for training LLMs can be used to train an agent in a 3D video game environment from pixels. We investigate the importance of each stage of the LLM training pipeline, while providing guidance and insights for successfully applying this approach to agents. Our paper provides an alternative perspective to contemporary LLM Agents on how recent progress in LLMs can be leveraged for decision-making agents, and we hope will illuminate a path towards developing more generally capable agents for video games and beyond. Project summary and videos: https://adamjelley.github.io/aligning-agents-like-llms .