Language-Guided Semantic Affordance Exploration for Efficient Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Reinforcement Learning (RL) shows great potential for robotic manipulation tasks, yet it suffers from low sample efficiency and needs extensive exploration of state-action spaces. Some recent methods leverage the commonsense knowledge and reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to guide RL exploration toward more meaningful states. However, LLMs may generate semantically correct but physically infeasible plans, leading to unreliable solutions. In this paper, we propose \textit{Language-Guided exploration for Reinforcement Learning} (LGRL), a novel framework that utilizes LLMs' planning capability to directly guide RL exploration. This approach utilizes LLM planning at both the task and affordance levels, enhancing learning efficiency by directing RL agents toward semantically meaningful actions. Unlike previous methods that rely on the optimality of LLM-generated plans or rewards, LGRL corrects sub-optimality and explores multimodal affordance-level plans without human intervention.
We evaluated LGRL on pick-and-place tasks within standard RL benchmark environments, demonstrating significant improvements in both sample efficiency and success rates.