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Text2Reward: Reward Shaping with Language Models for Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 2309.11489 v3 pith:XQU2KGED submitted 2023-09-20 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CLcs.RO

classification cs.LGcs.AIcs.CLcs.RO
keywords rewardtext2rewardcodesdensefunctionslanguagelocomotionpolicies
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Designing reward functions is a longstanding challenge in reinforcement learning (RL); it requires specialized knowledge or domain data, leading to high costs for development. To address this, we introduce Text2Reward, a data-free framework that automates the generation and shaping of dense reward functions based on large language models (LLMs). Given a goal described in natural language, Text2Reward generates shaped dense reward functions as an executable program grounded in a compact representation of the environment. Unlike inverse RL and recent work that uses LLMs to write sparse reward codes or unshaped dense rewards with a constant function across timesteps, Text2Reward produces interpretable, free-form dense reward codes that cover a wide range of tasks, utilize existing packages, and allow iterative refinement with human feedback. We evaluate Text2Reward on two robotic manipulation benchmarks (ManiSkill2, MetaWorld) and two locomotion environments of MuJoCo. On 13 of the 17 manipulation tasks, policies trained with generated reward codes achieve similar or better task success rates and convergence speed than expert-written reward codes. For locomotion tasks, our method learns six novel locomotion behaviors with a success rate exceeding 94%. Furthermore, we show that the policies trained in the simulator with our method can be deployed in the real world. Finally, Text2Reward further improves the policies by refining their reward functions with human feedback. Video results are available at https://text-to-reward.github.io/ .

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

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    A taxonomy of robot learning on a weights-versus-skills axis, with a five-rung self-improvement ladder whose top cell (feedback plus memory plus search) holds only a few recent systems.

  2. EgoExo-Con: Exploring View-Invariant Video Temporal Understanding

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    Most Video-LLMs answer temporal questions far less consistently when the same event is shown from ego and exo views, and a GRPO variant with a reasoning-similarity reward partially closes the gap.

  3. Text2Touch: Tactile In-Hand Manipulation with LLM-Designed Reward Functions

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    First demonstration that LLM-generated reward functions using tactile sensing can outperform a human-engineered baseline for real-world in-hand rotation.

  4. Meta-Learned Reward Shaping for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

    cs.LG 2026-07 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Training a small multi-task reward-shaping network and adding it to the RLHF reward is claimed to improve LLaMA-3-8B alignment across four benchmarks, but the supporting theory is not established.

  5. LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework

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    Expecting over scoring-token logits yields continuous, scalable verification that improves agent trajectory selection and dense RL rewards across coding, robotics, and medical benchmarks.

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    A hierarchical ARPO+LLaRA framework that jointly sets image resolution, transmit power, and UAV trajectory reduces simulated latency for onboard VLM inference in low-altitude economy networks.

  7. Reward Evolution with Graph-of-Thoughts: A Bi-Level Language Model Framework for Reinforcement Learning

    cs.RO 2025-09 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    RE-GoT combines graph-of-thoughts planning in LLMs with VLM feedback from rollout videos to automatically write and refine RL reward functions, beating prior LLM-based reward design on RoboGen and ManiSkill2.

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