To solve difficult tasks, humans ask questions to acquire knowledge from external sources. In contrast, classical reinforcement learning agents lack such an ability and often resort to exploratory behavior. This is exacerbated as few present-day environments support querying for knowledge. In order to study how agents can be taught to query external knowledge via language, we first introduce two new environments: the grid-world-based Q-BabyAI and the text-based Q-TextWorld. In addition to physical interactions, an agent can query an external knowledge source specialized for these environments to gather information. Second, we propose the "Asking for Knowledge" (AFK) agent, which learns to generate language commands to query for meaningful knowledge that helps solve the tasks. AFK leverages a non-parametric memory, a pointer mechanism and an episodic exploration bonus to tackle (1) irrelevant information, (2) a large query language space, (3) delayed reward for making meaningful queries. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the AFK agent outperforms recent baselines on the challenging Q-BabyAI and Q-TextWorld environments.
Reasoning While Asking: Transforming Reasoning Large Language Models from Passive Solvers to Proactive Inquirers
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology（新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；Artificial Intelligence Research Institute（人工智能研究院）；Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；University of Texas, Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
Distant Supervision for E-commerce Query Segmentation via Attention Network
Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）；The University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）；Central South University（中南大学）；Hebei University of Technology（河北工业大学）；Hainan University（海南大学）
Sea AI Lab, Singapore（新加坡海智实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
ADAM: A Systematic Data Extraction Attack on Agent Memory via Adaptive Querying
University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Amazon, USA（亚马逊）；University of South Florida, USA（南佛罗里达大学）；Rochester Institute of Technology, USA（罗切斯特理工学院）；Purdue University, USA（普渡大学）；North Carolina State University, USA（北卡罗来纳州立大学）
