This repository holds the code for the paper Pre-Learning Environment Representations for Data-Efficient Neural Instruction Following from ACL 2019.

To run this code, you will need Python 3 with PyTorch 1.0 or greater, as well as the absl-py package.

To run the experiments in the SHRDLURN blocks environment, use this command:

python3 evaluate.py --dataset stacks --pretrain_prefix "stacks_model_"

This will run the full model, including discrete representations and the encoder matching loss. To run without the model improvements, use:

python3 evaluate.py --dataset stacks --pretrain_prefix "stacks_model_" --continuous_message --model_message_loss_weight 0.0

Additional flags are defined at the top of the relevant python files.

To run a baseline model with no pre-training, use:

python3 evaluate.py --dataset stacks --baseline

For the string manipulation environment, you will first need to generate pre-training transitions as a separate step with:

python3 regexp/generate.py

You will only need to run this once. Then, to run the actual experiments, use the command:

python3 evaluate.py --dataset regex --batch_increasing --model_train_decoder --pretrain_prefix "regex_model_"

By default evaluate.py will run both pre-training and language learning, but you can also run these separately. First run pre-training with:

python3 pretrain.py --dataset stacks --pretrain_prefix "stacks_model_"

Then run evaluate.py with the same pretrain_prefix and it will load the pre-trained model:

python3 evaluate.py --dataset stacks --pretrain_prefix "stacks_model_"