VLM-Safe-RL adds frozen VLM signals as anticipatory costs to the CMDP Lagrangian update via dual-path CLIP, VLM-Lagrange, and confidence gating, outperforming baselines on Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne while showing partial generalization.
Vlm-rl: A unified vision language models and reinforcement learning framework for safe autonomous driv- ing
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abstract
In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods for learning driving policies have gained increasing attention in the autonomous driving community and have achieved remarkable progress in various driving scenarios. However, traditional RL approaches rely on manually engineered rewards, which require extensive human effort and often lack generalizability. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{VLM-RL}, a unified framework that integrates pre-trained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with RL to generate reward signals using image observation and natural language goals. The core of VLM-RL is the contrasting language goal (CLG)-as-reward paradigm, which uses positive and negative language goals to generate semantic rewards. We further introduce a hierarchical reward synthesis approach that combines CLG-based semantic rewards with vehicle state information, improving reward stability and offering a more comprehensive reward signal. Additionally, a batch-processing technique is employed to optimize computational efficiency during training. Extensive experiments in the CARLA simulator demonstrate that VLM-RL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving a 10.5\% reduction in collision rate, a 104.6\% increase in route completion rate, and robust generalization to unseen driving scenarios. Furthermore, VLM-RL can seamlessly integrate almost any standard RL algorithms, potentially revolutionizing the existing RL paradigm that relies on manual reward engineering and enabling continuous performance improvements. The demo video and code can be accessed at: https://zilin-huang.github.io/VLM-RL-website.
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Seeing Before Colliding: Anticipatory Safe RL with Frozen Vision-Language Models
VLM-Safe-RL adds frozen VLM signals as anticipatory costs to the CMDP Lagrangian update via dual-path CLIP, VLM-Lagrange, and confidence gating, outperforming baselines on Safety-Gymnasium FormulaOne while showing partial generalization.
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SignReasoner: Compositional Reasoning for Complex Traffic Sign Understanding via Functional Structure Units
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Language-Driven Cost Optimization for Autonomous Driving
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XEmbodied: A Foundation Model with Enhanced Geometric and Physical Cues for Large-Scale Embodied Environments
XEmbodied is a foundation model that integrates 3D geometric and physical signals into VLMs using a 3D Adapter and Efficient Image-Embodied Adapter, plus progressive curriculum and RL post-training, to improve spatial reasoning and embodied performance on 18 benchmarks.