Pith. sign in

REVIEW 23 cited by

RL-VLM-F: Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Foundation Model Feedback

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2402.03681 v4 pith:Z6YO36QG submitted 2024-02-06 cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG

RL-VLM-F: Reinforcement Learning from Vision Language Foundation Model Feedback

classification cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG
keywords rewardmodelsrl-vlm-fagentdescriptioneffectivefoundationfunctions
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
0 comments
Share X Bluesky LinkedIn Reddit HN
read the original abstract

Reward engineering has long been a challenge in Reinforcement Learning (RL) research, as it often requires extensive human effort and iterative processes of trial-and-error to design effective reward functions. In this paper, we propose RL-VLM-F, a method that automatically generates reward functions for agents to learn new tasks, using only a text description of the task goal and the agent's visual observations, by leveraging feedbacks from vision language foundation models (VLMs). The key to our approach is to query these models to give preferences over pairs of the agent's image observations based on the text description of the task goal, and then learn a reward function from the preference labels, rather than directly prompting these models to output a raw reward score, which can be noisy and inconsistent. We demonstrate that RL-VLM-F successfully produces effective rewards and policies across various domains - including classic control, as well as manipulation of rigid, articulated, and deformable objects - without the need for human supervision, outperforming prior methods that use large pretrained models for reward generation under the same assumptions. Videos can be found on our project website: https://rlvlmf2024.github.io/

discussion (0)

Sign in with ORCID, Apple, or X to comment. Anyone can read and Pith papers without signing in.

Forward citations

Cited by 23 Pith papers

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

  1. Prompt-Driven Exploration

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0

    Prompt-Driven Exploration refines language prompts from rollout videos via a VLM, enabling RL to escape zero-reward VLA and LLM policies where action-space noise fails.

  2. QVal: Cheaply Evaluating Dense Supervision Signals for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    QVal is a new evaluation framework that directly measures dense supervision quality via Q-alignment to a reference policy, showing simple prompting baselines outperform 21 other methods across environments and models.

  3. World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Self-distillation from a caption-conditioned video diffusion model to an image-and-prompt-conditioned executor, enhanced by RL from VLM feedback, enables task solving in world models.

  4. CV-Arena: An Open Benchmark for Instructional Computer Vision Problem Solving with Human-AI Collaborative Preferences

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    CV-Arena is a new 12K-pair benchmark for instruction-guided real-image editing with 16 task types, CogRetriever curation, and Active Elo mixed human-AI evaluation that finds gaps in 21 models and presents CV-Agent.

  5. Reasoning Portability: Guiding Continual Learning for MLLMs in the RLVR Era

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Formalizes Reasoning Portability (RP) and proposes RDB-CL to modulate per-sample KL regularization in RLVR for MLLM continual learning, achieving +12.0% Last accuracy over vanilla RLVR baseline by preserving reusable ...

  6. Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.5

    Language-conditioned multi-axis human preferences yield denser rewards and steerable robot policies that outperform sparse and binary-preference baselines by 38 points on long-horizon manipulation.

  7. SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.5

    A video-language model with per-timestep spatiotemporal CoT and dense progress prediction can serve as the sole reward for zero-shot online robot RL on 24 unseen manipulation tasks.

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

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0

    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.

  9. MARS-RA: Rank Aggregation for Credit Assignment via Multimodal Comparisons in Embodied Multi-Agent Cooperation

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Credit assignment via LMM pairwise comparisons plus Bradley–Terry rank aggregation and potential-based shaping improves cooperative MARL under sparse rewards and dynamic agent counts.

  10. Learning More from Less: Reinforcement Learning from Hindsight

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Hindsight language-and-reward relabeling of failed VLA rollouts by a VLM yields roughly 5× sample-efficiency gains over standard GRPO on OOD LIBERO-PRO and real Franka tasks.

  11. Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    FPL trains a language-conditioned reward model from per-axis human preferences and a reward-conditioned policy, reporting 38-point average success gains over sparse-reward and binary-preference baselines on six manipu...

  12. Freeform Preference Learning for Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Freeform Preference Learning trains language-conditioned multi-axis reward models from human pairwise preferences to produce steerable and compositional robot policies that outperform sparse and binary-preference base...

  13. MAPL: Multi-Objective Preference Learning for Robot Locomotion

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MAPL trains quadruped locomotion policies from LLM-generated multi-objective trajectory preferences and matches or exceeds expert-designed reward performance in four environments without manual reward engineering.

  14. Learning Process Rewards via Success Visitation Matching for Efficient RL

    cs.LG 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Success Visitation Matching uses a discriminator to turn sparse outcome rewards into dense process rewards by matching visitations of successful episodes, provably preserving the optimal policy and speeding up robotic...

  15. Beyond Pixels: Learning Invariant Rewards for Real-World Robotics From a Few Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A framework learns invariant symbolic reward functions from few demonstrations that generalize zero-shot to variations in robotic manipulation tasks.

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

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

    Computing the expectation over scoring-token logits instead of taking argmax enables verification to scale along granularity, repetition, and criteria decomposition, achieving state-of-the-art on four agentic benchmar...

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

    cs.AI 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0

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

  18. MAGNIFIED: RL Fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models for Motion Planning

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    MAGNIFIED applies RL fine-tuning to MLLMs for autonomous driving motion planning, yielding over 10.5% lower overlap rate and 38.9% lower off-road rate than SFT baseline on Waymo Open Motion Dataset.

  19. AtlasVA: Self-Evolving Visual Skill Memory for Teacher-Free VLM Agents

    cs.CV 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    AtlasVA organizes VLM agent memory into spatial heatmaps, visual exemplars, and symbolic skills, evolving atlases from trajectories to act as potential-based shaping rewards in teacher-free reinforcement learning.

  20. Reflection-Based Task Adaptation for Self-Improving VLA

    cs.RO 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Reflective Self-Adaptation combines failure-reflective reinforcement learning with success-guided imitation learning to enable faster and more reliable task adaptation for pre-trained Vision-Language-Action models.

  21. UAV-VL-R1: Generalizing Vision-Language Models via Supervised Fine-Tuning and Multi-Stage GRPO for UAV Visual Reasoning

    cs.CV 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    UAV-VL-R1 combines SFT and multi-stage GRPO reinforcement learning on a new 50,019-sample HRVQA-VL dataset to deliver substantially higher zero-shot accuracy on UAV visual reasoning tasks than both its 2B baseline and...

  22. Digitizing Coaching Intelligence: An Agentic Framework for Holistic Athlete Profiling using VLM and RAG

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    Presents a hybrid agentic framework using MediaPipe, Llama-4-scout VLM, LangGraph orchestration, and RAG for holistic athlete profiling aligned with SAI protocols.

  23. Meta-Learning and Meta-Reinforcement Learning -- Tracing the Path towards DeepMind's Adaptive Agent

    cs.AI 2026-02 unverdicted novelty 2.0

    A survey provides a task-based formalization of meta-learning and meta-RL while chronicling algorithms that lead to DeepMind's Adaptive Agent.