VLM Q-Learning: Aligning Vision-Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Grigsby, Jake, Zhu, Yuke, Ryoo, Michael, Niebles, Juan Carlos
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866916722095685632
author Grigsby, Jake
Zhu, Yuke
Ryoo, Michael
Niebles, Juan Carlos
author_facet Grigsby, Jake
Zhu, Yuke
Ryoo, Michael
Niebles, Juan Carlos
contents Recent research looks to harness the general knowledge and reasoning of large language models (LLMs) into agents that accomplish user-specified goals in interactive environments. Vision-language models (VLMs) extend LLMs to multi-modal data and provide agents with the visual reasoning necessary for new applications in areas such as computer automation. However, agent tasks emphasize skills where accessible open-weight VLMs lag behind their LLM equivalents. For example, VLMs are less capable of following an environment's strict output syntax requirements and are more focused on open-ended question answering. Overcoming these limitations requires supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on task-specific expert demonstrations. Our work approaches these challenges from an offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) perspective. RL lets us fine-tune VLMs to agent tasks while learning from the unsuccessful decisions of our own model or more capable (larger) models. We explore an off-policy RL solution that retains the stability and simplicity of the widely used SFT workflow while allowing our agent to self-improve and learn from low-quality datasets. We demonstrate this technique with two open-weight VLMs across three multi-modal agent domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle VLM Q-Learning: Aligning Vision-Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making
Grigsby, Jake
Zhu, Yuke
Ryoo, Michael
Niebles, Juan Carlos
Machine Learning
Recent research looks to harness the general knowledge and reasoning of large language models (LLMs) into agents that accomplish user-specified goals in interactive environments. Vision-language models (VLMs) extend LLMs to multi-modal data and provide agents with the visual reasoning necessary for new applications in areas such as computer automation. However, agent tasks emphasize skills where accessible open-weight VLMs lag behind their LLM equivalents. For example, VLMs are less capable of following an environment's strict output syntax requirements and are more focused on open-ended question answering. Overcoming these limitations requires supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on task-specific expert demonstrations. Our work approaches these challenges from an offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) perspective. RL lets us fine-tune VLMs to agent tasks while learning from the unsuccessful decisions of our own model or more capable (larger) models. We explore an off-policy RL solution that retains the stability and simplicity of the widely used SFT workflow while allowing our agent to self-improve and learn from low-quality datasets. We demonstrate this technique with two open-weight VLMs across three multi-modal agent domains.
title VLM Q-Learning: Aligning Vision-Language Models for Interactive Decision-Making
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03181