无需奖励信号,通过视频帧序关系学习控制策略。
Rank-Then-Act: Reward-Free Control from Frame-Order Progress

- 用视觉语言模型从打乱的视频帧中恢复时序顺序,生成进度评分。
- 设计相关性奖励函数,实现稳定跨任务迁移与性能提升。
- 适合无奖励环境下的强化学习,尤其适用于视频演示学习。
我们提出一种名为 Rank-Then-Act (RTA) 的框架,可在无环境奖励的情况下,仅从专家视频示范中学习控制策略。RTA 离线训练一个视觉语言模型(VLM)作为基于进度的序数评分器,通过在打乱的帧序列上使用组相对策略优化(GRPO)目标,迫使模型依赖视觉语义而非时间线索恢复时序。重要的是,不直接将评分器作为标量奖励,而是设计一种基于斯皮尔曼等级相关性的奖励函数:在每个交互窗口,计算预测进度排名与真实时间索引之间的相关性,生成有界且尺度不变的学习信号。该设计解耦了奖励学习与绝对校准,实现了跨任务和环境的稳定迁移。我们在离散控制基准(PyBoy: Catrap, Kirby)和连续控制任务(PointMaze, MetaWorld)上评估了 RTA,结果表明其性能持续优于或媲美现有基于视频的奖励学习方法与基于排名的基线,同时展示出单一预训练进度评分器在多任务间的强复用能力。结果表明,基于视频序数信号的相关性结构化监督足以支持策略学习,为显式奖励设计提供了一种可扩展的替代方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We introduce Rank-Then-Act (RTA), a framework for learning control policies from expert video demonstrations without environment rewards. RTA trains a Vision-Language Model (VLM) offline as a progress-based ordinal scorer, using a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) objective over shuffled frame sequences, which forces the model to recover temporal ordering from visual semantics rather than trivial time cues. Importantly, instead of using the scorer directly as a scalar reward model, we propose a correlation-based reward function for reinforcement learning: at each interaction window, we compute the Spearman rank correlation between predicted progress rankings and true temporal indices, yielding a bounded, scale-invariant learning signal. This design decouples reward learning from absolute calibration and enables stable transfer across tasks and environments. We evaluate RTA on discrete control benchmarks (PyBoy: Catrap, Kirby) and continuous control tasks (PointMaze, MetaWorld). RTA consistently matches or outperforms prior video-based reward learning methods and rank-based baselines, while demonstrating strong cross-task reuse of a single pretrained progress scorer. Our results suggest that correlation-structured supervision over video-derived ordinal signals is sufficient for policy learning, offering a scalable alternative to explicit reward design.
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