Cache-Efficient Posterior Sampling for Reinforcement Learning with LLM-Derived Priors Across Discrete and Continuous Domains

Abstract

Integrating large language models (LLMs) as action proposers in reinforcement learning (RL) significantly boosts performance in text-based environments but incurs prohibitive computational costs. We introduce a cache-efficient framework for Bayesian RL that leverages LLM-derived action suggestions, drastically reducing these costs while maintaining near-optimal performance. Our approach features an adaptive caching mechanism, optimized via meta-learning based on policy performance, to enable efficient inference across text-based games (e.g., TextWorld, ALFWorld) and robotic control tasks (e.g., MuJoCo, MetaWorld). This framework achieves a 3.8× – 4.7× reduction in LLM queries and 4.0× – 12.0× lower median latencies (85–93ms on consumer hardware), while retaining 96–98% of the uncached policy’s performance. We provide theoretical guarantees on the reliability of cached decisions with Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence bounds, which are validated empirically by high success rates (90.4–95.6%) in complex text environments. For offline RL, our proposed CQL-Prior variant improves performance by 14–29% and reduces training time by 38–40%. Evaluations across eight diverse tasks demonstrate the framework’s generalizability and practicality for resource-constrained settings, making LLM-guided RL a viable and accessible approach for both text-based and robotic applications.