Vision-Language Models as a Source of Rewards

Kate Baumli, Satinder Singh, Feryal Behbahani, Harris Chan, Gheorghe Comanici, Sebastian Flennerhag, Maxime Gazeau, Kristian Holsheimer, Dan Horgan, Michael Laskin, Clare Lyle, Volodymyr Mnih, Alexander Neitz, Fabio Pardo, Jack Parker-Holder, John Quan, Tim Rocktäschel, Himanshu Sahni, Tom Schaul, Yannick Schroecker et al. (4 additional authors not shown)

Keywords: reward modeling, goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, generalist agents

TL;DR: We investigate using frozen vision-language models from the CLIP family as a source of binary rewards to train language goal-conditioned agents in several visual environments (Playhouse, AndroidEnv)

Abstract: Building generalist agents that can accomplish many goals in rich open-ended environments is one of the research frontiers for reinforcement learning. A key limiting factor for building generalist agents with RL has been the need for a large number of reward functions for achieving different goals. We investigate the feasibility of using off-the-shelf vision-language models, or VLMs, as sources of rewards for reinforcement learning agents. We show how rewards for visual achievement of a variety of language goals can be derived from the CLIP family of models, and used to train RL agents that can achieve a variety of language goals. We showcase this approach in two distinct visual domains and present a scaling trend showing how larger VLMs lead to more accurate rewards for visual goal achievement, which in turn produces more capable RL agents.

Submission Number: 48