DISCOVERYWORLD: A Virtual Environment for Developing and Evaluating Automated Scientific Discovery Agents

Automated scientific discovery promises to accelerate progress across scientific domains. However, developing and evaluating an AI agent's capacity for end-to-end scientific reasoning is challenging as running real-world experiments is often prohibitively expensive or infeasible. In this work we introduce DISCOVERYWORLD, the first virtual environment for developing and benchmarking an agent's ability to perform complete cycles of novel scientific discovery. DISCOVERYWORLD contains a variety of different challenges, covering topics as diverse as radioisotope dating, rocket science, and proteomics, to encourage development of general discovery skills rather than task-specific solutions. DISCOVERYWORLD itself is an inexpensive, simulated, text-based environment (with optional 2D visual overlay). It includes 120 different challenge tasks, spanning eight topics each with three levels of difficulty and several parametric variations. Each task requires an agent to form hypotheses, design and run experiments, analyze results, and act on conclusions. DISCOVERYWORLD further provides three automatic metrics for evaluating performance, based on (a) task completion, (b) task-relevant actions taken, and (c) the discovered explanatory knowledge. We find that strong baseline agents, that perform well in prior published environments, struggle on most DISCOVERYWORLD tasks, suggesting that DISCOVERYWORLD captures some of the novel challenges of discovery, and thus that DISCOVERYWORLD may help accelerate near-term development and assessment of scientific discovery competency in agents. Code available at: www.github.com/allenai/discoveryworld

Can Language Models Serve as Text-Based World Simulators?

Virtual environments play a key role in benchmarking advances in complex planning and decision-making tasks but are expensive and complicated to build by hand. Can current language models themselves serve as world simulators, correctly predicting how actions change different world states, thus bypassing the need for extensive manual coding? Our goal is to answer this question in the context of text-based simulators. Our approach is to build and use a new benchmark, called ByteSized32-State-Prediction, containing a dataset of text game state transitions and accompanying game tasks. We use this to directly quantify, for the first time, how well LLMs can serve as text-based world simulators. We test GPT-4 on this dataset and find that, despite its impressive performance, it is still an unreliable world simulator without further innovations. This work thus contributes both new insights into current LLM's capabilities and weaknesses, as well as a novel benchmark to track future progress as new models appear.

PDDLEGO: Iterative Planning in Textual Environments

Planning in textual environments have been shown to be a long-standing challenge even for current models. A recent, promising line of work uses LLMs to generate a formal representation of the environment that can be solved by a symbolic planner. However, existing methods rely on a fully-observed environment where all entity states are initially known, so a one-off representation can be constructed, leading to a complete plan. In contrast, we tackle partially-observed environments where there is initially no sufficient information to plan for the end-goal. We propose PDDLEGO that iteratively construct a planning representation that can lead to a partial plan for a given sub-goal. By accomplishing the sub-goal, more information is acquired to augment the representation, eventually achieving the end-goal. We show that plans produced by few-shot PDDLEGO are 43% more efficient than generating plans end-to-end on the Coin Collector simulation, with strong performance (98%) on the more complex Cooking World simulation where end-to-end LLMs fail to generate coherent plans (4%).

Enhancing Systematic Decompositional Natural Language Inference Using Informal Logic

Contemporary language models enable new opportunities for structured reasoning with text, such as the construction and evaluation of intuitive, proof-like textual entailment trees without relying on brittle formal logic. However, progress in this direction has been hampered by a long-standing lack of a clear protocol for determining what valid compositional entailment is. This absence causes noisy datasets and limited performance gains by modern neuro-symbolic engines. To address these problems, we formulate a consistent and theoretically grounded approach to annotating decompositional entailment datasets, and evaluate its impact on LLM-based textual inference. We find that our resulting dataset, RDTE (Recognizing Decompositional Textual Entailment), has a substantially higher internal consistency (+9%) than prior decompositional entailment datasets, suggesting that RDTE is a significant step forward in the long-standing problem of forming a clear protocol for discerning entailment. We also find that training an RDTE-oriented entailment classifier via knowledge distillation and employing it in a modern neuro-symbolic reasoning engine significantly improves results (both accuracy and proof quality) over other entailment classifier baselines, illustrating the practical benefit of this advance for textual inference.

Self-Supervised Behavior Cloned Transformers are Path Crawlers for Text Games

In this work, we introduce a self-supervised behavior cloning transformer for text games, which are challenging benchmarks for multi-step reasoning in virtual environments. Traditionally, Behavior Cloning Transformers excel in such tasks but rely on supervised training data. Our approach auto-generates training data by exploring trajectories (defined by common macro-action sequences) that lead to reward within the games, while determining the generality and utility of these trajectories by rapidly training small models then evaluating their performance on unseen development games. Through empirical analysis, we show our method consistently uncovers generalizable training data, achieving about 90\% performance of supervised systems across three benchmark text games.

CLIN: A Continually Learning Language Agent for Rapid Task Adaptation and Generalization

Language agents have shown some ability to interact with an external environment, e.g., a virtual world such as ScienceWorld, to perform complex tasks, e.g., growing a plant, without the startup costs of reinforcement learning. However, despite their zero-shot capabilities, these agents to date do not continually improve over time beyond performance refinement on a specific task. Here we present CLIN, the first language-based agent to achieve this, so that it continually improves over multiple trials, including when both the environment and task are varied, and without requiring parameter updates. Our approach is to use a persistent, dynamic, textual memory centered on causal abstractions (rather than general "helpful hints") that is regularly updated after each trial so that the agent gradually learns useful knowledge for new trials. In the ScienceWorld benchmark, CLIN is able to continually improve on repeated trials on the same task and environment, outperforming state-of-the-art reflective language agents like Reflexion by 23 absolute points. CLIN can also transfer its learning to new environments (or new tasks), improving its zero-shot performance by 4 points (13 for new tasks) and can further improve performance there through continual memory updates, enhancing performance by an additional 17 points (7 for new tasks). This suggests a new architecture for agents built on frozen models that can still continually and rapidly improve over time.

ByteSized32: A Corpus and Challenge Task for Generating Task-Specific World Models Expressed as Text Games

In this work we examine the ability of language models to generate explicit world models of scientific and common-sense reasoning tasks by framing this as a problem of generating text-based games. To support this, we introduce ByteSized32, a corpus of 32 highly-templated text games written in Python totaling 24k lines of code, each centered around a particular task, and paired with a set of 16 unseen text game specifications for evaluation. We propose a suite of automatic and manual metrics for assessing simulation validity, compliance with task specifications, playability, winnability, and alignment with the physical world. In a single-shot evaluation of GPT-4 on this simulation-as-code-generation task, we find it capable of producing runnable games in 27% of cases, highlighting the difficulty of this challenge task. We discuss areas of future improvement, including GPT-4's apparent capacity to perform well at simulating near canonical task solutions, with performance dropping off as simulations include distractors or deviate from canonical solutions in the action space.

From Words to Wires: Generating Functioning Electronic Devices from Natural Language Descriptions

In this work, we show that contemporary language models have a previously unknown skill -- the capacity for electronic circuit design from high-level textual descriptions, akin to code generation. We introduce two benchmarks: Pins100, assessing model knowledge of electrical components, and Micro25, evaluating a model's capability to design common microcontroller circuits and code in the Arduino ecosystem that involve input, output, sensors, motors, protocols, and logic -- with models such as GPT-4 and Claude-V1 achieving between 60% to 96% Pass@1 on generating full devices. We include six case studies of using language models as a design assistant for moderately complex devices, such as a radiation-powered random number generator, an emoji keyboard, a visible spectrometer, and several assistive devices, while offering a qualitative analysis performance, outlining evaluation challenges, and suggesting areas of development to improve complex circuit design and practical utility. With this work, we aim to spur research at the juncture of natural language processing and electronic design.

Behavior Cloned Transformers are Neurosymbolic Reasoners

In this work, we explore techniques for augmenting interactive agents with information from symbolic modules, much like humans use tools like calculators and GPS systems to assist with arithmetic and navigation. We test our agent's abilities in text games -- challenging benchmarks for evaluating the multi-step reasoning abilities of game agents in grounded, language-based environments. Our experimental study indicates that injecting the actions from these symbolic modules into the action space of a behavior cloned transformer agent increases performance on four text game benchmarks that test arithmetic, navigation, sorting, and common sense reasoning by an average of 22%, allowing an agent to reach the highest possible performance on unseen games. This action injection technique is easily extended to new agents, environments, and symbolic modules.

ScienceWorld: Is your Agent Smarter than a 5th Grader?

This paper presents a new benchmark, ScienceWorld, to test agents' scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum. Despite the recent transformer-based progress seen in adjacent fields such as question-answering, scientific text processing, and the wider area of natural language processing, we find that current state-of-the-art models are unable to reason about or explain learned science concepts in novel contexts. For instance, models can easily answer what the conductivity of a previously seen material is but struggle when asked how they would conduct an experiment in a grounded, interactive environment to find the conductivity of an unknown material. This begs the question of whether current models are simply retrieving answers by way of seeing a large number of similar input examples or if they have learned to reason about concepts in a reusable manner. We hypothesize that agents need to be grounded in interactive environments to achieve such reasoning capabilities. Our experiments provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis -- showing that a 1.5 million parameter agent trained interactively for 100k steps outperforms a 11 billion parameter model statically trained for scientific question-answering and reasoning via millions of expert demonstrations.