Dual-Granularity Contrastive Reward via Generated Episodic Guidance for Efficient Embodied RL

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Liu, Xin, Li, Yixuan, Chen, Yuhui, Qin, Yuxing, Li, Haoran, Zhao, Dongbin
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Liu, Xin
Li, Yixuan
Chen, Yuhui
Qin, Yuxing
Li, Haoran
Zhao, Dongbin
author_facet Liu, Xin
Li, Yixuan
Chen, Yuhui
Qin, Yuxing
Li, Haoran
Zhao, Dongbin
contents Designing suitable rewards poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for embodied manipulation. Trajectory success rewards are suitable for human judges or model fitting, but the sparsity severely limits RL sample efficiency. While recent methods have effectively improved RL via dense rewards, they rely heavily on high-quality human-annotated data or abundant expert supervision. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes Dual-granularity contrastive reward via generated Episodic Guidance (DEG), a novel framework to seek sample-efficient dense rewards without requiring human annotations or extensive supervision. Leveraging the prior knowledge of large video generation models, DEG only needs a small number of expert videos for domain adaptation to generate dedicated task guidance for each RL episode. Then, the proposed dual-granularity reward that balances coarse-grained exploration and fine-grained matching, will guide the agent to efficiently approximate the generated guidance video sequentially in the contrastive self-supervised latent space, and finally complete the target task. Extensive experiments on 18 diverse tasks across both simulation and real-world settings show that DEG can not only serve as an efficient exploration stimulus to help the agent quickly discover sparse success rewards, but also guide effective RL and stable policy convergence independently.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Dual-Granularity Contrastive Reward via Generated Episodic Guidance for Efficient Embodied RL
Liu, Xin
Li, Yixuan
Chen, Yuhui
Qin, Yuxing
Li, Haoran
Zhao, Dongbin
Machine Learning
Robotics
Designing suitable rewards poses a significant challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), especially for embodied manipulation. Trajectory success rewards are suitable for human judges or model fitting, but the sparsity severely limits RL sample efficiency. While recent methods have effectively improved RL via dense rewards, they rely heavily on high-quality human-annotated data or abundant expert supervision. To tackle these issues, this paper proposes Dual-granularity contrastive reward via generated Episodic Guidance (DEG), a novel framework to seek sample-efficient dense rewards without requiring human annotations or extensive supervision. Leveraging the prior knowledge of large video generation models, DEG only needs a small number of expert videos for domain adaptation to generate dedicated task guidance for each RL episode. Then, the proposed dual-granularity reward that balances coarse-grained exploration and fine-grained matching, will guide the agent to efficiently approximate the generated guidance video sequentially in the contrastive self-supervised latent space, and finally complete the target task. Extensive experiments on 18 diverse tasks across both simulation and real-world settings show that DEG can not only serve as an efficient exploration stimulus to help the agent quickly discover sparse success rewards, but also guide effective RL and stable policy convergence independently.
title Dual-Granularity Contrastive Reward via Generated Episodic Guidance for Efficient Embodied RL
topic Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12636