论文73°

SAGE框架:从VLM教师学习自主策略

Selective Agent Guidance via Entropy: Learning Autonomous Policies from Imperfect VLM Teachers

精选理由

SAGE框架让VLM只在关键时刻提供指导,大幅减少调用次数,学习到的策略甚至能超越VLM教师表现。

AI 摘要

研究人员提出SAGE框架,通过熵值选择性查询视觉语言模型(VLM)教师。该框架在训练过程中仅在不确定时查询VLM,执行建议动作,并将指导提炼为轻量级强化学习策略。在稀疏奖励视觉推理和导航任务中,SAGE学习到的策略在评估时无需VLM指导,并在多个环境中优于无引导的强化学习。

原文 · arXiv cs.LG

Selective Agent Guidance via Entropy: Learning Autonomous Policies from Imperfect VLM Teachers

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) provide useful priors for interactive decision-making, but using them directly as policies is expensive and brittle: they must be queried at every step, do not improve from environment interaction, and can repeat systematic errors. We study how to learn a cheap autonomous policy from an online, expensive, and imperfect but informative VLM teacher. We propose SAGE (Selective Agent Guidance via Entropy), a framework that queries a VLM only when the learner is uncertain, executes the suggested action during training, and distills guidance into a lightweight Reinforcement Learning (RL) policy. Because VLM advice is not always reliable, SAGE can weight teacher-action distillation using environment-derived advantages rather than treating all suggestions as equally useful. Across sparse-reward visual reasoning and navigation tasks, SAGE learns policies that act without VLM guidance at evaluation time and improves over unguided RL in several environments, including settings where the learned policy exceeds its VLM teacher. The results show that selective guidance is most beneficial when the VLM can help the agent discover high-reward trajectories, and less useful when unguided exploration already succeeds or teacher actions do not lead to informative experience. SAGE also reduces VLM usage by prompting the teacher only on a fraction of training steps and requiring no VLM calls at deployment. Overall, our results suggest that VLMs don't need to be used as fixed policies to be useful; they can instead act as temporary, imperfect sources of guidance whose value is tested and internalized through interaction.