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Related papers: Vision-Language Models as a Source of Rewards

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Defining reward functions for skill learning has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in defining reward signals for teaching robots manipulation skills. However, existing…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Kaifeng Zhang , Zhao-Heng Yin , Weirui Ye , Yang Gao

Designing effective reward functions is crucial to training reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. However, this design is non-trivial, even for domain experts, due to the subjective nature of certain tasks that are hard to quantify…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Rishi Hazra , Alkis Sygkounas , Andreas Persson , Amy Loutfi , Pedro Zuidberg Dos Martires

Vision Language Models exhibit impressive performance for various tasks, yet they often lack the sophisticated situational reasoning required for complex decision-making. This paper shows that VLMs can achieve surprisingly strong…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Zhe Hu , Jing Li , Zhongzhu Pu , Hou Pong Chan , Yu Yin

How can we design good goals for arbitrarily intelligent agents? Reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural approach. Unfortunately, RL does not work well for generally intelligent agents, as RL agents are incentivised to shortcut the reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-11 Tom Everitt , Marcus Hutter

Enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is a challenging task that has attracted increasing attention in the community. Recently, several studies have applied Reinforcement Learning with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Tong Xiao , Xin Xu , Zhenya Huang , Hongyu Gao , Quan Liu , Qi Liu , Enhong Chen

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable embodied decision-making but rely heavily on imitation learning, leading to compounding errors and poor robustness under distribution shift. Reinforcement learning (RL) can mitigate these issues…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven highly effective in eliciting the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by this success, recent studies have explored applying similar techniques to vision-language models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Yan Chen , Long Li , Teng Xi , Long Zeng , Jingdong Wang

Reward design remains a critical bottleneck in visual reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation. In simulated environments, rewards are conventionally designed based on the distance to a target position. However, such precise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nan Tang , Jing-Cheng Pang , Guanlin Li , Chao Qian , Yang Yu

For a general-purpose robot to operate in reality, executing a broad range of instructions across various environments is imperative. Central to the reinforcement learning and planning for such robotic agents is a generalizable reward…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Yanting Yang , Minghao Chen , Qibo Qiu , Jiahao Wu , Wenxiao Wang , Binbin Lin , Ziyu Guan , Xiaofei He

The challenge of developing powerful and general Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents has received increasing attention in recent years. Much of this effort has focused on the single-agent setting, in which an agent maximizes a predefined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-21 Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Peter Sunehag , Edward Hughes , Hongyuan Zha

A central goal of cognitive modeling is to develop models that not only predict human behavior but also provide insight into the underlying cognitive mechanisms. While neural network models trained on large-scale behavioral data often…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jian-Qiao Zhu , Hanbo Xie , Dilip Arumugam , Robert C. Wilson , Thomas L. Griffiths

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards~(RLVR) has become a prominent paradigm to enhance the capabilities (i.e.\ long-context) of Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, it often relies on gold-standard answers or explicit evaluation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yao Xiao , Lei Wang , Yue Deng , Guanzheng Chen , Ziqi Jin , Jung-jae Kim , Xiaoli Li , Roy Ka-wei Lee , Lidong Bing

The alignment between humans and machines is a critical challenge in artificial intelligence today. Reinforcement learning, which aims to maximize a reward function, is particularly vulnerable to the risks associated with poorly designed…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Valentin Cuzin-Rambaud , Emilien Komlenovic , Alexandre Faure , Bruno Yun

What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) show such broad visual reasoning is within reach, but the recipe behind…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Gabriel Sarch , Linrong Cai , Qunzhong Wang , Haoyang Wu , Danqi Chen , Zhuang Liu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is one of the active fields in machine learning, demonstrating remarkable potential in tackling real-world challenges. Despite its promising prospects, this methodology has encountered with issues and challenges,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Alireza Rashidi Laleh , Majid Nili Ahmadabadi

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) to cater to different human preferences, learning new skills, and unlearning harmful behavior is an important problem. Search-based methods, such as Best-of-N or Monte-Carlo Tree Search, are performant,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Seungwook Han , Idan Shenfeld , Akash Srivastava , Yoon Kim , Pulkit Agrawal

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has demonstrated significant success in enhancing mathematical reasoning and coding performance of large language models (LLMs), especially when structured reference answers are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Yi Su , Dian Yu , Linfeng Song , Juntao Li , Haitao Mi , Zhaopeng Tu , Min Zhang , Dong Yu

Reinforcement learning (RL) is increasingly used to post-train medical Vision-Language Models (VLMs), yet it remains unclear whether RL improves medical visual reasoning or mainly sharpens behaviors already induced by supervised fine-tuning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ahmadreza Jeddi , Kimia Shaban , Negin Baghbanzadeh , Natasha Sharan , Abhishek Moturu , Elham Dolatabadi , Babak Taati

For an autonomous agent to fulfill a wide range of user-specified goals at test time, it must be able to learn broadly applicable and general-purpose skill repertoires. Furthermore, to provide the requisite level of generality, these skills…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Ashvin Nair , Vitchyr Pong , Murtaza Dalal , Shikhar Bahl , Steven Lin , Sergey Levine

With extensive pre-trained knowledge and high-level general capabilities, large language models (LLMs) emerge as a promising avenue to augment reinforcement learning (RL) in aspects such as multi-task learning, sample efficiency, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Yuji Cao , Huan Zhao , Yuheng Cheng , Ting Shu , Yue Chen , Guolong Liu , Gaoqi Liang , Junhua Zhao , Jinyue Yan , Yun Li