Exploration and Exploitation Errors Are Measurable for Language Model Agents
Language Model (LM) agents are increasingly used in complex open-ended decision-making tasks, from AI coding to physical AI. A core requirement in these settings is the ability to both explore the problem space and exploit acquired knowledge effectively. However, systematically distinguishing and quantifying exploration and exploitation from observed actions without access to the agent's internal policy remains challenging. To address this, we design controllable environments inspired by practical embodied AI scenarios. Each environment consists of a partially observable 2D grid map and an unknown task Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). The map generation can be programmatically adjusted to emphasize exploration or exploitation difficulty. To enable policy-agnostic evaluation, we design a metric to quantify exploration and exploitation errors from agent's actions. We evaluate a variety of frontier LM agents and find that even state-of-the-art models struggle on our task, with different models exhibiting distinct failure modes. We further observe that reasoning models solve the task more effectively and show both exploration and exploitation can be significantly improved through minimal harness engineering. We release our code \href{https://github.com/jjj-madison/measurable-explore-exploit}{here}.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Never Forget: Balancing Exploration and Exploitation via Learning Optical Flow
Exploration bonus derived from the novelty of the states in an environment has become a popular approach to motivate exploration for deep reinforcement learning agents in the past few years. Recent methods such as curios…
Deep Reinforcement LearningOptical Flow EstimationReinforcement LearningSemantic Bandits: In-Context Exploration-Exploitation is Biased by Semantic Priors
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as decision-making agents in settings that require sophisticated environmental exploration. However, existing work has raised questions about how LLMs actually balan…
MAGE: Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Language Agents toward Strategic Exploration and Exploitation
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in learned tasks, yet they often struggle to adapt to non-stationary environments with feedback. While In-Context Learning and external memory of…
Reinforcement LearningWESE: Weak Exploration to Strong Exploitation for LLM Agents
Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential as an intelligent agent. However, existing researches mainly focus on enhancing the agent's reasoning or decision-making abilities through wel…
Decision MakingPrompt EngineeringDisentangling Exploration from Exploitation
Starting from Robbins (1952), the literature on experimentation via multi-armed bandits has wed exploration and exploitation. Nonetheless, in many applications, agents' exploration and exploitation need not be intertwine…
DisentanglementMulti-Armed Bandits