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Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners

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arxiv 2411.04549 v1 pith:Y4FY3MVX submitted 2024-11-07 cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG

Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners

classification cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG
keywords valuetemporallearningprogresstasktasksframesin-context
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can scale and generalize. To address these challenges, we present Generative Value Learning (\GVL), a universal value function estimator that leverages the world knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs) to predict task progress. Naively asking a VLM to predict values for a video sequence performs poorly due to the strong temporal correlation between successive frames. Instead, GVL poses value estimation as a temporal ordering problem over shuffled video frames; this seemingly more challenging task encourages VLMs to more fully exploit their underlying semantic and temporal grounding capabilities to differentiate frames based on their perceived task progress, consequently producing significantly better value predictions. Without any robot or task specific training, GVL can in-context zero-shot and few-shot predict effective values for more than 300 distinct real-world tasks across diverse robot platforms, including challenging bimanual manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GVL permits flexible multi-modal in-context learning via examples from heterogeneous tasks and embodiments, such as human videos. The generality of GVL enables various downstream applications pertinent to visuomotor policy learning, including dataset filtering, success detection, and advantage-weighted regression -- all without any model training or finetuning.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

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

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.5

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  3. Robot Critics that Sweat the Small Stuff

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    Fine-tuning VLMs with pairwise progress supervision from policy rollouts improves fine-grained failure detection and boosts robot manipulation success by 11% real-world and 5.9% in simulation.

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

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    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...

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