Agents

Glenn Matlin, Isaac Song, Anthony Wen-Ming Zang, and Mark O. Riedl
No One Wins in Nuclear War: Social Simulations of High-Stakes Military Decision-Making
Proceedings of the COLM 2026 Workshop on Social Simulations with LLMs (2026).
arXiv Workshop bibtexSocial Simulation Agents Large Language Models AI Safety

Mark O. Riedl and Glenn Matlin
Position: AI is Not Ready for Strategic Conflict
Proceedings of the COLM 2026 Workshop on Social Simulations with LLMs (2026).
Workshop bibtexSocial Simulation Agents Policy and Law AI Safety

Isaac Song, Mohammed Rehan Parwani, Glenn Matlin, Emile Timothy Anand, Akhil Theerthala, Arjun Chatterjee, Anthony Wen-Ming Zang, Maria Kostylew, Yonadav G. Shavit, Sebastian Krier, and Mark O. Riedl
Role Steering of Language Models for Social Simulations
Proceedings of the COLM 2026 Workshop on Social Simulations with LLMs (2026).
arXiv Workshop bibtexSocial Simulation Agents Large Language Models Interpretability

Geigh Zollicoffer, Tanush Chopra, Mingkuan Yan, Xiaoxu Ma, Kenneth Eaton, and Mark Riedl
World Model Robustness via Surprise Recognition
Proceedings of the 2026 CVPR Findings (2026).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning AI Safety

Madhuri Singh, Grace C. Kim, Mika Okomoto, Aarushi Ammavajjala, Amal Alabdulkarim, Genni Mansi, and Mark O. Riedl
Counterfactual Explanations for Agentic Workflows
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Workshop on Human-Centered Explainable AI (2026).
zenodo Workshop bibtexAgents Explainable AI

Mika Okamoto, Ansel Kaplan Erol, and Mark Riedl
Explainable Model Routing for Agentic Workflows
Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Workshop on Human-Centered Explainable AI (2026).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Explainable AI

Deven R. Desai and Mark O. Riedl
Using Agency Law to Tame AI Agents
Berkeley Technology Law Review forthcoming (2026).
SSRN Journal bibtexAgents Policy and Law Value Alignment

Glenn Matlin, Parv Mahajan, Isaac Song, Yixiong Hao, Ryan Bard, Stu Topp, Evan Montoya, M. Rehan Parwani, Soham Shetty, and Mark Riedl
Shall We Play a Game? Language Models for Open-ended Wargames
Proceedings of the 2025 EMNLP Word Play Workshop (2025).
arXiv Workshop bibtexSocial Simulation Agents AI Safety

Mark O. Riedl and Deven R. Desai
AI Agents and the Law
Proceedings of the 2025 AAAI Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (2025).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Policy and Law Value Alignment

Maduri Singh, Amal Alabdulkarim, Gennie Mansi, and Mark O. Riedl
Explainable Reinforcement Learning Agents Using World Models
Proceedings of the 2025 IJCAI Workshop on Explainable AI (2025).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Explainable AI Reinforcement Learning

Deven Desai and M. O. Riedl
Responsible AI Agents
arXiv:2502.18359 (2025).
arXiv bibtexAgents Policy and Law Value Alignment

Geigh Zollicoffer, Kenneth Eaton, Jonathan Balloch, Julia Kim, Riedl Mark O., and Robert Wright
Novelty Detection in Reinforcement Learning with World Models
International Conference on Machine Learning (2025).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning AI Safety

Amal Alabdulkarim, Madhuri Singh, Gennie Mansi, Kaely Hall, and Mark O. Riedl
Experiential Explanations for Reinforcement Learning
Neural Computing and Applications 37 (2025).
arXiv Journal bibtexAgents Explainable AI Reinforcement Learning

Jonathan C. Balloch, Rishav Bhagat, Geigh Zollicoffer, Ruoran Jia, Julia Kim, and Mark O. Riedl
Is Exploration All You Need? Effective Exploration Characteristics for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
Proceedings of the 2024 Reinforcement Learning Conference Workshop on Finding the Frame: Examining Conceptual Frameworks in Reinforcement Learning (2024).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Christopher Z. Cui, Xiangyu Peng, and Mark O. Riedl
A Mixture-of-Experts Approach to Few-Shot Task Transfer in Open-Ended Text Worlds
arXiv:2405.06059 (2024).
arXiv bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Rishav Bhagat, Jonathan Balloch, Zhiyu Lin, Julia Kim, and Mark Riedl
External Model Motivated Agents: Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced Environment Sampling
Proceedings of the 2024 Reinforcement Learning Conference Workshop on Reinforcement Learning Beyond Rewards (2024).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Kenneth Eaton, Jonathan Balloch, Julia Kim, and Mark Riedl
The Interpretability of Codebooks in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning is Limited
Proceedings of the 2024 Reinforcement Learning Conference Workshop I Can't Believe It's not Better (2024).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Explainable AI Interpretability Reinforcement Learning

Xiangyu Peng, Christopher Cui, Wei Zhou, Renee Jia, and Mark O. Riedl
Story Shaping: Teaching Agents Human-like Behavior with Stories
Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (2023).
arXiv Conference bibtexStorytelling Interactive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning Value Alignment

Wei Zhou, Xiangyu Peng, and Mark O. Riedl
Dialogue Shaping: Empowering Agents through NPC Interaction
Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI Workshop on Experimental AI in Games (2023).
arXiv Workshop bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Zexin Chen, Eric Zhou, Kenneth Eaton, Xiangyu Peng, and Mark O. Riedl
Ambient Adventures: Teaching ChatGPT on Developing Complex Stories
arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.01734 (2023).
arXiv bibtexInteractive Stories Agents

Christopher Cui, Xiangyu Peng, and Mark O. Riedl
Thespian: Multi-Character Text Role-Playing Game Agents
Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI Workshop on Experimental AI in Games (2023).
arXiv Workshop bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Jonathan C. Balloch, Zhiyu Lin, Xiangyu Peng, Mustafa Hussain, Aarun Srinivas, Robert Wright, Julia M. Kim, and Mark O. Riedl
Neuro-Symbolic World Models for Adapting to Open World Novelty
Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (2023).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Xiangyu Peng, Mark O. Riedl, and Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
Inherently Explainable Reinforcement Learning in Natural Language
Proceedings of NeurIPS 2022 (2022).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Explainable AI Interpretability Reinforcement Learning

Jonathan Balloch, Zhiyu Lin, Mustafa Hussain, Aarun Srinivas, Robert Wright, Xiangyu Peng, Julia Kim, and Mark Riedl
NovGrid: A Flexible Grid World for Evaluating Agent Response to Novelty
Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium on Designing Artificial Intelligence for Open Worlds (2022).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Jonathan C Balloch, Julia Kim, Jessica L Inman, and Mark O. Riedl
The Role of Exploration for Task Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
Proceedings of the IROS 2022 Workshop on Lifelong Learning of High-level Cognitive and Reasoning Skills (2022).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Xiangyu Peng, Mark O. Riedl, and Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
Inherently Explainable Reinforcement Learning in Natural Language
Proceedings of the 2022 Multi-disciplinary Conference on Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making (2022).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Explainable AI Interpretability Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Renee Jia, and Mark O. Riedl
Situated Dialogue Learning through Procedural Environment Generation
Proceedings of ACL 2022 (2022).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning Game Generation

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Mark Riedl
Learning Knowledge Graph-based World Models of Textual Environments
Thirty-fifth Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (2021).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Xiangyu Peng, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, and Mark Riedl
Explainable Reinforcement Learning Agents with Stacked Hierarchical Graph Attention
Workshop on Explainable Graph-based Machine Learning at AKBC (2021).
Workshop bibtexAgents Explainable AI Interpretability Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Mark O. Riedl
Modeling Worlds in Text
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, Benchmarks Track (2021).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Social Simulation Agents Reinforcement Learning

Xiangyu Peng, Jonathan C. Balloch, and Mark O. Riedl
Detecting and Adapting to Novelty in Games
Proceedings of the AAAI21 Workshop on on Reinforcement Learning in Games (2021).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Md Sultan Al Nahian, Spencer Frazier, Brent Harrison, and Mark O. Riedl
Training Value-Aligned Reinforcement Learning Agents Using a Normative Prior
arXiv:2104.09469 (2021).
arXiv bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning Value Alignment AI Safety

D. Srivastava, Spencer Frazier, Mark O. Riedl, and K. Feigh
Effect of Interaction Design of Reinforcement Learning Agents on Human Satisfaction in Partially Observable Domains
International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging, and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (2021).
Conference bibtexAgents Explainable AI Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Mark O Riedl
Situated Language Learning via Interactive Narratives
arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.09977 (2021).
arXiv bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Ethan Tien, Zhaochen Luo, and Mark O Riedl
Exploration Strategies for Text-Adventure Agents
Proceedings of the IJCAI Knowledge-based Reinforcement Learning Workshop (2020).
Workshop bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Matthew Hausknecht, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Marc-Alexandre Cot'e, and Xingdi Yuan
Interactive Fiction Games: A Colossal Adventure
Thirty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) (2020).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Matthew Hausknecht
Graph Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Natural Language Action Spaces
International Conference on Learning Representations (2020).
OpenReview Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Ethan Tien, Matthew Hausknecht, and Mark O Riedl
How to avoid being eaten by a grue: Structured exploration strategies for textual worlds
arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07409 (2020).
arXiv bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Sahith Dambekodi, Spencer Frazier, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, and Mark O Riedl
Playing Text-Based Games with Common Sense
Proceedings of the NeurIPS Wordplay workshop (2020).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Mark O. Riedl
Transfer in Deep Reinforcement Learning using Knowledge Graphs
Proceedings of the EMNLP Workshop on TextGraphs: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing (2019).
arXiv Workshop bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Spencer Frazier and Mark O. Riedl
Improving Deep Reinforcement Learning in Minecraft with Action Advice
Proceedings of the 2019 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (2019).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Upol Ehsan, Pradyumna Tambwekar, Larry Chan, Brent Harrison, and Mark O. Riedl
Automated Rationale Generation: A Technique for Explainable AI and its Effects on Human Perceptions
Proceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (2019).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Explainable AI

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Mark O. Riedl
Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Proceedings of the 2019 NeurIPS Workshop on Word Play: Reinforcement and Language Learning in Text-based Games (2019).
Workshop bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Mark O. Riedl
Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Association for Computational Linguistics (2019).
arXiv Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Lara Martin, Srijan Sood, and Mark Riedl
Dungeons and DQNs: Toward Reinforcement Learning Agents that Play Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Proceedings of the 2018 Joint Workshop on Workshop on Intelligent Cinematography and Editing and Intelligent Narrative Technologies (2018).
PDF Workshop bibtexInteractive Stories Agents Reinforcement Learning

Upol Ehsan, Brent Harrison, Larry Chan, and Mark O Riedl
Rationalization: A neural machine translation approach to generating natural language explanations
Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (2018).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Explainable AI

Brent Harrison, Upol Ehsan, and Mark O. Riedl
Guiding Reinforcement Learning Exploration Using Natural Language
Proceedings of the 2018 International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (2018).
arXiv Conference bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Upol Ehsan, Pradyumna Tambwekar, Larry Chan, Brent Harrison, and Mark O. Riedl
Learning to Generate Natural Language Rationales for Game Playing Agents
Proceedings of the 2018 AAAI Workshop on Experimental AI in Games (2018).
Workshop bibtexAgents Explainable AI

Mark O. Riedl and Brent. Harrison
Enter the Matrix: A Virtual World Approach to Safely Interruptable Autonomous Systems
Proceedings of the AAAI 2017 Workshop on SafeAI (2017).
arXiv Workshop bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning AI Safety

Z. Lin, B. Harrison, A. Keech, and M. O. Riedl
Explore, Exploit or Listen: Combining Human Feedback and Policy Model to Speed up Deep Reinforcement Learning in 3D Worlds
ArXiv:1709.03969 (2017).
arXiv bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Sam Krening, Brent Harrison, Karen Feigh, Charles Isbell, Mark O. Riedl, and Andrea Thomaz
Learning from Explanations using Sentiment and Advice in RL
IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (2017).
PDF bibtexAgents Reinforcement Learning

Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison
Using Stories to Teach Human Values to Artificial Agents
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on AI, Ethics and Society (2016).
PDF Workshop bibtexAgents Value Alignment AI Safety

Brent Harrsion and Mark O Riedl
Learning From Stories: Using Crowdsourced Narratives to Train Virtual Agents
Proceedings of the 2016 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (2016).
PDF Conference bibtexAgents Value Alignment AI Safety Human Computation

Brent Harrison and Mark Riedl
Towards Learning From Stories: An Approach for Interactive Machine Learning
Proceedings of the AAAI'16 Workshop on Symbiotic Cognitive Systems (2016).
PDF Workshop bibtexAgents Value Alignment AI Safety

Brent Harrison, Siddhartha Banerjee, and Mark O. Riedl
Learning from Stories: Using Natural Communication to Train Believable Agents
Proceedings of the 2016 IJCAI Workshop on Interactive Machine Learning (2016).
PDF Workshop bibtexAgents Value Alignment AI Safety

Mark O. Riedl and Andrew Stern
Believable Agents and Intelligent Scenario Direction for Social and Cultural Leadership Training
Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (BRIMS) (2006).
PDF Conference bibtexInteractive Stories Social Simulation Agents Education