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Supplementto" Sample-EfficientReinforcement LearningforLinearly-ParameterizedMDPs withaGenerativeModel "

Neural Information Processing Systems

In addition, we define1 to be a vector with all the entries being 1, andI be the identity matrix. Suppose thatδ > 0andε (0,(1 γ) 1/2]. The remainder of this section is devotedtoprovingTheorem3. VT) to be the policy (resp. The remainder of this section is devotedtoprovingTheorem4.


VARP: Reinforcement Learning from Vision-Language Model Feedback with Agent Regularized Preferences

Singh, Anukriti, Bhaskar, Amisha, Yu, Peihong, Chakraborty, Souradip, Dasyam, Ruthwik, Bedi, Amrit, Tokekar, Pratap

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative feedback rather than hand-crafted signals, yet scaling human annotations remains challenging. Recent work uses Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to automate preference labeling, but a single final-state image generally fails to capture the agent's full motion. In this paper, we present a two-part solution that both improves feedback accuracy and better aligns reward learning with the agent's policy. First, we overlay trajectory sketches on final observations to reveal the path taken, allowing VLMs to provide more reliable preferences-improving preference accuracy by approximately 15-20% in metaworld tasks. Second, we regularize reward learning by incorporating the agent's performance, ensuring that the reward model is optimized based on data generated by the current policy; this addition boosts episode returns by 20-30% in locomotion tasks. Empirical studies on metaworld demonstrate that our method achieves, for instance, around 70-80% success rate in all tasks, compared to below 50% for standard approaches. These results underscore the efficacy of combining richer visual representations with agent-aware reward regularization.