candidate action
The Lighthouse of Language: Enhancing LLMAgents via Critique-Guided Improvement
Large language models (LLMs) have recently transformed from text-based assistants to autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and iteratively improving their actions. While numerical reward signals and verifiers can effectively rank candidate actions, they often provide limited contextual guidance.
7 Checklist
For all authors... (a) Do the main claims made in the abstract and introduction accurately reflect the paper's contributions and scope? If you ran experiments... (a) Did you include the code, data, and instructions needed to reproduce the main experimental results (either in the supplemental material or as a URL)? [Y es] We release the code and the models If you used crowdsourcing or conducted research with human subjects... (a) Did you include the full text of instructions given to participants and screenshots, if applicable? [Y es] We included the instructions given to participants in appendix F. In this appendix, we describe the neural network architecture used for our agents.Figure 2: Transformer encoder (left) used in both policy proposal network (center) and value network (right). Our model architecture is shown in Figure 2. It is essentially identical to the architecture in [11], except that it replaces the specialized graph-convolution-based encoder with a much simpler transformer encoder, removes all dropout layers, and uses separate policy and value networks. Aside from the encoder, the other aspects of the architecture are the same, notably the LSTM policy decoder, which decodes orders through sequential attention over each successive location in the encoder output to produce an action. The input to our new encoder is also identical to that of [11], consisting of the same representation of the current board state, previous board state, and a recent order embedding. Rather than processing various parts of this input in two parallel trunks before combining them into a shared encoder trunk, we take the simpler approach of concatenating all features together at the start, resulting in 146 feature channels across each of 81 board locations (75 region + 6 coasts). We pass this through a linear layer, add pointwise a learnable per-position per-channel bias, and then pass this to a standard transformer encoder architecture.
RoVer: Robot Reward Model as Test-Time Verifier for Vision-Language-Action Model
Dai, Mingtong, Liu, Lingbo, Bai, Yongjie, Liu, Yang, Wang, Zhouxia, SU, Rui, Chen, Chunjie, Lin, Liang, Wu, Xinyu
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have become a prominent paradigm for embodied intelligence, yet further performance improvements typically rely on scaling up training data and model size -- an approach that is prohibitively expensive for robotics and fundamentally limited by data collection costs. We address this limitation with $\mathbf{RoVer}$, an embodied test-time scaling framework that uses a $\mathbf{Ro}$bot Process Reward Model (PRM) as a Test-Time $\mathbf{Ver}$ifier to enhance the capabilities of existing VLA models without modifying their architectures or weights. Specifically, RoVer (i) assigns scalar-based process rewards to evaluate the reliability of candidate actions, and (ii) predicts an action-space direction for candidate expansion/refinement. During inference, RoVer generates multiple candidate actions concurrently from the base policy, expands them along PRM-predicted directions, and then scores all candidates with PRM to select the optimal action for execution. Notably, by caching shared perception features, it can amortize perception cost and evaluate more candidates under the same test-time computational budget. Essentially, our approach effectively transforms available computing resources into better action decision-making, realizing the benefits of test-time scaling without extra training overhead. Our contributions are threefold: (1) a general, plug-and-play test-time scaling framework for VLAs; (2) a PRM that jointly provides scalar process rewards and an action-space direction to guide exploration; and (3) an efficient direction-guided sampling strategy that leverages a shared perception cache to enable scalable candidate generation and selection during inference.
CompassNav: Steering From Path Imitation To Decision Understanding In Navigation
Li, LinFeng, Zhao, Jian, Xie, Yuan, Tan, Xin, Li, Xuelong
The dominant paradigm for training Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in navigation relies on imitating expert trajectories. This approach reduces the complex navigation task to a sequence-to-sequence replication of a single correct path, fundamentally limiting the agent's ability to explore and generalize. In this work, we argue for and introduce a new paradigm: a shift from Path Imitation to Decision Understanding. The goal of this paradigm is to build agents that do not just follow, but truly understand how to navigate. We materialize this through two core contributions: first, we introduce Compass-Data-22k, a novel 22k-trajectory dataset.Its Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) subset provides a panoramic view of the decision landscape by annotating all feasible actions with A* geodesic distances. Second, we design a novel gap-aware hybrid reward function that dynamically adapts its feedback to decision certainty, shifting between decisive signals for optimal actions and nuanced scores to encourage exploration. Integrated into an SFT-then-RFT recipe, our CompassNav agent is trained not to memorize static routes, but to develop an internal ``compass'' that constantly intuits the direction to the goal by evaluating the relative quality of all possible moves. This approach enables our 7B agent to set a new state-of-the-art on Goal navigation benchmarks, outperforming even larger proprietary models, and achieve robust real-world goal navigation on a physical robot.
Verifier-free Test-Time Sampling for Vision Language Action Models
Jang, Suhyeok, Kim, Dongyoung, Kim, Changyeon, Kim, Youngsuk, Shin, Jinwoo
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in robot control. However, they remain fundamentally limited in tasks that require high precision due to their single-inference paradigm. While test-time scaling approaches using external verifiers have shown promise, they require additional training and fail to generalize to unseen conditions. We propose Masking Distribution Guided Selection (MG-Select), a novel test-time scaling framework for VLAs that leverages the model's internal properties without requiring additional training or external modules. Our approach utilizes KL divergence from a reference action token distribution as a confidence metric for selecting the optimal action from multiple candidates. We introduce a reference distribution generated by the same VLA but with randomly masked states and language conditions as inputs, ensuring maximum uncertainty while remaining aligned with the target task distribution. Additionally, we propose a joint training strategy that enables the model to learn both conditional and unconditional distributions by applying dropout to state and language conditions, thereby further improving the quality of the reference distribution. Our experiments demonstrate that MG-Select achieves significant performance improvements, including a 28%/35% improvement in real-world in-distribution/out-of-distribution tasks, along with a 168% relative gain on RoboCasa pick-and-place tasks trained with 30 demonstrations.
GUI-PRA: Process Reward Agent for GUI Tasks
Xiong, Tao, Hu, Xavier, Chen, Yurun, Liu, Yuhang, Wu, Changqiao, Gao, Pengzhi, Liu, Wei, Luan, Jian, Zhang, Shengyu
Graphical User Interface (GUI) Agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show significant potential for automating tasks. However, they often struggle with long-horizon tasks, leading to frequent failures. Process Reward Models (PRMs) are a promising solution, as they can guide these agents with crucial process signals during inference. Nevertheless, their application to the GUI domain presents unique challenges. When processing dense artificial inputs with long history data, PRMs suffer from a "lost in the middle" phenomenon, where the overwhelming historical context compromises the evaluation of the current step. Furthermore, standard PRMs lacks GUI changing awareness, providing static evaluations that are disconnected from the dynamic consequences of actions, a critical mismatch with the inherently dynamic nature of GUI tasks. In response to these challenges, we introduce GUI-PRA (Process Reward Agent for GUI Tasks), a judge agent designed to better provide process reward than standard PRM by intelligently processing historical context and actively perceiving UI state changes. Specifically, to directly combat the ``lost in the middle'' phenomenon, we introduce a dynamic memory mechanism consisting of two core components: a Relevance-based Retrieval Module to actively fetch pertinent information from long histories and a Progressive Summarization Module to dynamically condense growing interaction data, ensuring the model focuses on relevant context. Moreover, to address the lack of UI changing awareness, we introduce an Aadaptive UI Perception mechanism. This mechanism enables the agent to reason about UI state changes and dynamically select the most appropriate tool to gather grounded visual evidence, ensuring its evaluation is always informed by the current UI context.