REVIEW 5 major objections 6 minor 1 cited by
Learning Instruction-Following Policies through Open-Ended Instruction Relabeling with Large Language Models
T0 review · 5 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-06 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read An LLM that reads failed trajectories and relabels them with accomplished subtasks turns sparse failures into training signal, and the resulting policy beats baselines on Craftax and generalizes to unseen instruction variants.
desk verdict A useful new combination that repurposes failed trajectories with LLM-generated instructions, but the unvalidated reward proxy and missing HIR baseline keep it from being fully convincing. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central mechanism is LLM-guided hindsight instruction relabeling: each rollout is converted by a function $h$ into a temporally structured text prompt, from which a pretrained LLM samples $K$ candidate instructions for subtasks the agent fully accomplished (Eq. 4). Each candidate is scored by the embedding-based reward $r_t = \mathrm{cosim}\big(f_{state}(o_t,a_t,o_{t+1}),\, f_{instr}(i)\big)$ (Eq. 8), where $f_{state}$ embeds the transition and $f_{instr}$ is a pretrained sentence-embedding encoder such as SBERT, and an episode is declared successful and terminated the first time the reward exceeds threshold $\delta$. The acceptance criterion is formalized as the oracle value comparison of Eq. (7), $V^{\pi_{oracle}}_{i'}(s_{t+1}) > V^{\pi_{oracle}}_{i_{orig}}(s_{t+1})$, and the prioritized instruction replay buffer (Section 4.3), inspired by Prioritized Level Replay, sorts instructions into failing, learning-boundary, and mastered categories, evicting by priority so that the uniform sampling of instructions at reset concentrates training on tasks near the agent's competence frontier.
What would settle it
On a held-out set of rollouts, compare the success labels produced by the training reward (cosine similarity above $\delta$, Eq. 8) against the environment's own ground-truth achievement flags for the relabeled instructions: if a large fraction of cosine-declared successes are not real completions, the reward is rewarding spurious behavior and OIR's measured gains are not evidence of genuine instruction following. A complementary check is to relabel trajectories with deliberately irrelevant instructions while keeping the same cosine-similarity machinery, and to see whether the gap over baselines persists; if it does, the reward proxy, not the LLM's semantic relabeling, is carrying the result.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
On its own terms, the paper's discovery is that hindsight can operate at the level of natural-language instructions rather than states or goals. Given a trajectory rendered as a temporally ordered text prompt, the LLM returns candidate instructions describing what the agent accomplished, including in episodes that failed their originally assigned instruction, and each candidate is scored by the cosine similarity between the transition embedding and the instruction embedding (Eq. 8), with a threshold $\delta$ marking success and episode termination. The acceptance ideal is that a relabeled instruction yields higher oracle value than the original instruction (Eq. 7), and a prioritized instruction buffer, modeled on Prioritized Level Replay, keeps the policy training on tasks at its learning frontier. Empirically, OIR completes roughly ten of the Craftax instructions versus fewer than four for other baselines, reaches an average success rate of 33.10%, masters hard multi-step tasks such as 'Defeat Zombie' (87.78%), 'Place Table' (95.83%), and 'Make Wood Pickaxe' (76.59%), and retains its edge on unseen simple and complex instruction variants; the paper also records a trade-off in which infrequently sampled instructions such as 'Wake Up' lose proficiency to the ground-truth-reward baseline.
Load-bearing premise
Everything rests on the reward proxy of Eq. 8: an episode is treated as successfully completing an LLM-generated instruction when the cosine similarity between the trajectory's transition embeddings and the instruction's embedding exceeds threshold $\delta$, and the paper never verifies that this proxy corresponds to the agent actually doing what the instruction describes.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Failed and sparse trajectories become reusable training data: without any human annotation, a single policy learns to follow many open-ended instructions.
- The policy generalizes to unseen instruction variants, both simple rewrites and semantically enriched compositions, because the relabeled instruction space is wider than the environment's predefined achievements.
- Hard multi-step tasks that reward-free baselines never master ('Defeat Zombie', 'Make Wood Pickaxe', 'Place Table') become learnable, since hindsight relabeling supplies intermediate semantic goals.
- Sample efficiency improves on every reported metric: higher aggregate score, more completed instructions, and higher average success rate at the same environment-step budget.
- Because OIR needs only a textual rendering of observations rather than environment-specific reward logic, the same recipe applies in principle to any environment that can describe its states in text.
Reading between the lines
- The paper does not measure how often a cosine-declared success (reward above $\delta$ in Eq. 8) matches a ground-truth accomplishment, so a fair share of the relabeled signal may reward trajectories that merely resemble the instruction in embedding space; one testable consequence is that OIR's advantage should shrink in environments where textual observations are less informative about actual stat
- There is a closed loop worth probing: the instruction encoder that scores the reward is also the encoder conditioning the policy, and the LLM generates instructions from the same textual observations that get embedded; this coupling could make measured instruction diversity (the t-SNE coverage) grow faster than genuine behavioral diversity.
- Because the discoverable instruction space is bounded by what the LLM can recognize from text, OIR's ceiling is set by the model's world knowledge rather than by the environment; a human-in-the-loop verification of relabeled instructions, which the paper itself lists as future work, would directly test how much of the relabeled signal is true task completion.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes Open-Ended Instruction Relabeling (OIR), an off-policy instruction-conditioned RL algorithm that uses an LLM to generate open-ended natural-language instructions from collected trajectories, including unsuccessful ones. These instructions are embedded and used to compute dense cosine-similarity rewards (Eq. 8); success is declared when the similarity exceeds a threshold δ, and a prioritized replay buffer manages the growing instruction set. Experiments on Craftax-Classic compare OIR against PQN with a cosine-similarity reward, PQN with the ground-truth reward, and ELLM, and the authors report improvements in aggregate score, completed instructions, average success rate, generalization to simple and complex instruction variants, and semantic coverage, with an ablation over δ.
Significance. If the results hold, the paper makes a useful contribution by reducing reliance on human-annotated instruction datasets and by turning failed trajectories into instruction-following data. The idea of using LLMs to reinterpret trajectories retrospectively is timely, the algorithm is clearly presented, and evaluation on a public benchmark with external ground-truth success signals is a strength. However, the evidence as presented is not yet convincing: the most directly relevant baseline, HIR, is omitted; the cosine-similarity training reward is never validated against true task completion; and several numerical claims in the text contradict the figures. The contribution is potentially significant, but the current manuscript requires additional verification before the claims can be accepted.
major comments (5)
- [§5, Baselines] The paper does not compare against Hindsight Instruction Relabeling (HIR) [Zhang et al., 2023], which is the most relevant prior method and is cited in Section 2. Because OIR is explicitly a hindsight instruction relabeling method, the claimed advantage over state-of-the-art methods cannot be assessed without an HIR baseline, for example HIR using template-based or non-LLM relabeling. Please add such a comparison or temper the claim.
- [§4.2, Eq. (8)] The training reward is defined entirely by the cosine similarity between transition and instruction embeddings, and Section 5 states that all environment rewards and achievement signals are removed during training. The paper never measures the correlation between this proxy and ground-truth completion on the same trajectories. If high cosine similarity can occur without task completion (e.g., proximity to trees without an inventory change), the dense reward may reward spurious behavior, and the reported gains over PQN and ELLM could be a reward-density artifact. Please validate the proxy, for example by reporting precision and recall of the threshold rule against ground-truth success on relabeled trajectories, or include an oracle-relabeling ablation that uses true success signals.
- [§5.1, Figure 2(d)] The numerical claims in the text are not consistent with the figure. The text reports 'Defeat Zombie' (87.78%), 'Place Table' (95.83%), and 'Make Wood Pickaxe' (76.59%), but Figure 2(d) displays values 3.40, 29.93, and 1.82 for these tasks. Likewise, the text reports approximately 10 completed instructions and an average success rate of 33.10%, while Figure 2(b) and (c) show final values of 7.28 and 18.20. These discrepancies must be reconciled before the empirical claims can be evaluated.
- [§4.1, Algorithm 1] Section 4.1 states that rule-based instructions are incorporated as an additional source of supervision and that candidate instructions are subject to further filtering or selection, but no rule-based instructions, filtering criteria, or selection step appear in Algorithm 1 or in the implementation details. Moreover, the prompt template in Section 4.1 ('What instruction is this trajectory following?') differs from the prompt in Appendix B.5, which asks for 'Completed Instructions' and prohibits movement instructions. The method as described is therefore not fully specified; please align the description and the implementation.
- [Table 1, Appendix B.2] Several hyperparameters required by Algorithm 1 are missing from Table 1, including K (number of LLM candidates), the buffer thresholds τ_low and τ_high, and the exact δ values used for the PQN baselines (Table 1 lists '0.5&0.9' for PQN, while Figures 2 and 3 report separate PQN (δ=0.5) and PQN (δ=0.9) curves). In addition, ELLM uses 1024 parallel environments while OIR and PQN use 64; because total timesteps are matched, this may be acceptable, but the potential effect of parallelism on exploration and LLM query batching should be justified. Please provide complete hyperparameters and discuss the fairness of the ELLM setup.
minor comments (6)
- [§4.2, Eq. (8)] The equation writes fstate(ot) but the expression uses fstate(ot, at, ot+1); please fix the notation.
- [§4.2] The sentence 'an episode is deemed successful the first time the reward exceeds a predefined threshold δ' should specify that the reward is computed on transitions and that termination is applied only once per episode.
- [Algorithm 1, line 9] The reward rcand is computed from the full trajectory τe and instruction i′, but Eq. (8) requires a single transition; please clarify how the trajectory-level reward is aggregated over timesteps.
- [Abstract and Introduction] The claim that the method 'completely eliminates' dependence on manual annotations is too strong, since the prompt template, instruction-generation principles, and hyperparameters are manually designed.
- [§5.3, Figure 5] The diversity claim is based on a visual t-SNE plot; please include a quantitative coverage metric, such as the number of distinct semantic clusters or an embedding-volume estimate.
- [Throughout] Minor typos include 'acessible' in Section 4, 'extual' in the Figure 1 caption, and '1S-2046640' in Section 7; please proofread the manuscript.
Circularity Check
No circular derivation: OIR's surrogate reward is an explicit modeling choice, the headline claims are evaluated against external ground-truth signals, and the only self-citation is contextual and non-load-bearing.
full rationale
I find no circular step in the claimed derivation chain. OIR defines a surrogate reward (Eq. 8) as cosine similarity between a transition embedding and an instruction embedding, and the instructions used for relabeling are generated by an LLM from the same trajectories; this is an explicit modeling choice, not a result derived from the evaluation. Crucially, the paper removes environment rewards during training ('we completely remove all built-in rewards and environment-provided achievement signals during training') and evaluates with external ground-truth signals ('These signals are used only at evaluation to measure true instruction-following capabilities'). The headline comparisons in Figures 2 and 3 therefore do not reduce to the training proxy: no fitted parameter is renamed as a prediction, and the threshold δ is a hand-set hyperparameter whose ablation (Fig. 4) is not used to select the reported evaluation outcomes. The admitted limitation that LLM candidates can be inaccurate (Sec. 4.1) and the dependence on LLM quality (Sec. 6) are validity and robustness risks, not instances of logical circularity. The only self-citation, [Wang et al., 2025] in Section 2, appears in a contextual list of LLM action-guidance works and is not load-bearing. Accordingly, there are no circular steps to report.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (3)
- Reward threshold δ =
0.9 (ablation over 0.3, 0.5, 0.7, 0.9)
- Instruction buffer capacity Bmax =
10
- Number of LLM candidates K =
not reported
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption Cosine similarity between trajectory and instruction embeddings is a valid proxy for instruction completion (Eq. 8)
- domain assumption The LLM can reliably identify subtasks the agent actually accomplished from textual trajectories (Section 4.1)
- domain assumption SBERT instruction embeddings provide a semantically meaningful similarity space for open-ended instructions
- domain assumption Craftax-Classic with rewards removed is a representative testbed for open-ended instruction-following (Section 5)
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Learning Instruction-Following Policies through Open-Ended Instruction Relabeling with Large Language Models." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/AUFJ5RN5
@misc{pith2026250620061,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Learning Instruction-Following Policies through Open-Ended Instruction Relabeling with Large Language Models},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/AUFJ5RN5}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2506.20061}
}
read the original abstract
Developing effective instruction-following policies in reinforcement learning remains challenging due to the reliance on extensive human-labeled instruction datasets and the difficulty of learning from sparse rewards. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to automatically generate open-ended instructions retrospectively from previously collected agent trajectories. Our core idea is to employ LLMs to relabel unsuccessful trajectories by identifying meaningful subtasks the agent has implicitly accomplished, thereby enriching the agent's training data and substantially alleviating reliance on human annotations. Through this open-ended instruction relabeling, we efficiently learn a unified instruction-following policy capable of handling diverse tasks within a single policy. We empirically evaluate our proposed method in the challenging Craftax environment, demonstrating clear improvements in sample efficiency, instruction coverage, and overall policy performance compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Our results highlight the effectiveness of utilizing LLM-guided open-ended instruction relabeling to enhance instruction-following reinforcement learning.
Figures
Figures from the paper (2 more)
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
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Learning More from Less: Reinforcement Learning from Hindsight
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.
Reference graph
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Reviewed August 6, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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