Go to ICLR 2025 Workshop WRL homepageRL Zero: Zero-Shot Language to Behaviors without any Supervision
Rewards remain an opaque way to specify tasks for Reinforcement Learning, as humans are often unable to predict the optimal behavior corresponding to any given reward function, leading to poor reward design and reward hacking. Language presents an appealing way to communicate intent to agents but prior efforts to bypass reward design through language have been limited by costly and unscalable labeling efforts. In this work, we propose a method for a completely unsupervised alternative to grounding language instructions in a zero-shot manner to obtain policies. We present a solution that takes the form of imagine, project, and imitate: The agent imagines the observation sequence corresponding to the language description of a task, projects the imagined sequence to our target domain, and grounds it to a policy. We show that zero-shot language-to-behavior policy can be achieved by first projecting the imagined sequences, generated using video models, into real observations of an unsupervised RL agent and using zero-shot imitation to mimic the projected observations. Our method, RLZero, is the first to our knowledge to show zero-shot language to behavior generation abilities without any supervision on a variety of tasks. We further show that RLZero can also generate policies zero-shot from cross-embodied videos such as those scraped from YouTube.