Papers › Language Reward Modulation for Pretraining Reinforcement Learning

Language Reward Modulation for Pretraining Reinforcement Learning

23 Aug 2023arXiv:2308.12270archive 2025-07-28

Ademi Adeniji, Amber Xie, Carmelo Sferrazza, Younggyo Seo, Stephen James, Pieter Abbeel

Using learned reward functions (LRFs) as a means to solve sparse-reward reinforcement learning (RL) tasks has yielded some steady progress in task-complexity through the years. In this work, we question whether today's LRFs are best-suited as a direct replacement for task rewards. Instead, we propose leveraging the capabilities of LRFs as a pretraining signal for RL. Concretely, we propose LAnguage Reward Modulated Pretraining (LAMP) which leverages the zero-shot capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as a pretraining utility for RL as opposed to a downstream task reward. LAMP uses a frozen, pretrained VLM to scalably generate noisy, albeit shaped exploration rewards by computing the contrastive alignment between a highly diverse collection of language instructions and the image observations of an agent in its pretraining environment. LAMP optimizes these rewards in conjunction with standard novelty-seeking exploration rewards with reinforcement learning to acquire a language-conditioned, pretrained policy. Our VLM pretraining approach, which is a departure from previous attempts to use LRFs, can warmstart sample-efficient learning on robot manipulation tasks in RLBench.

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