Grounding Natural Language Commands to StarCraft II Game States for Narration-Guided Reinforcement Learning

While deep reinforcement learning techniques have led to agents that are successfully able to learn to perform a number of tasks that had been previously unlearnable, these techniques are still susceptible to the longstanding problem of {\em reward sparsity}. This is especially true for tasks such as training an agent to play StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game where reward is only given at the end of a game which is usually very long. While this problem can be addressed through reward shaping, such approaches typically require a human expert with specialized knowledge. Inspired by the vision of enabling reward shaping through the more-accessible paradigm of natural-language narration, we investigate to what extent we can contextualize these narrations by grounding them to the goal-specific states. We present a mutual-embedding model using a multi-input deep-neural network that projects a sequence of natural language commands into the same high-dimensional representation space as corresponding goal states. We show that using this model we can learn an embedding space with separable and distinct clusters that accurately maps natural-language commands to corresponding game states . We also discuss how this model can allow for the use of narrations as a robust form of reward shaping to improve RL performance and efficiency.