arXiv:2608.03875cs.LGcs.AI2026-08

用结构先验优化视觉语言模型奖励信号,提升强化学习稳定性

Enhancing VLM Reward Models Through Structure-Aware Fine-Tuning

论文配图:Enhancing VLM Reward Models Through Structure-Aware Fine-Tuning
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过LoRA适配器引入内在结构先验,自监督修正奖励信号
  • 在多种基底模型上实现更快策略收敛与更优对齐(EPIC距离改善)
  • 适合需要降低人工标注成本的文本条件强化学习研究者

设计有效的奖励函数仍是强化学习中的主要瓶颈。近期工作利用大型基础视觉语言模型(VLM)作为奖励模型,通过计算文本-观测相似性来规避手动奖励工程。尽管前景可观,这些奖励常存在噪声且不可靠,限制了部署时的直接应用。本文提出结构感知微调(SAFT),一种无需真实标签监督的简单自监督方法,可在线优化不完善的奖励信号。SAFT通过LoRA适配器利用内在结构先验,对VLM隐空间进行正则化。我们在一系列基底模型能力范围内进行了严格评估,结果表明SAFT持续降噪奖励景观,在策略收敛速度和对齐性能(EPIC距离)上显著优于基底模型,说明失败多源于结构脆弱性而非语义误解。通过将大量人工偏好标注替换为任务固有的结构归纳偏置,SAFT为稳定文本条件强化学习提供了可扩展路径,并凸显了将任务结构作为通用归纳偏置的广泛价值。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Designing effective reward functions remains a major bottleneck in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Recent work uses large foundation Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as reward models, computing text-observation similarity to bypass manual reward engineering. Although promising, these rewards are often noisy and unreliable, limiting their direct utility during deployment. We present Structure-Aware Fine-Tuning (SAFT), a simple, self-supervised method that refines these imperfect reward signals online without access to ground-truth supervision. SAFT leverages intrinsic structural priors to regularize the VLM's latent space via LoRA adapters. We rigorously evaluate SAFT across a spectrum of base model capabilities to demonstrate its versatility. Our results show that SAFT consistently denoises the reward landscape, yielding faster policy convergence and substantially improved alignment (EPIC distance) relative to the underlying base model, suggesting that failures can often be attributed to structural brittleness rather than semantic misunderstanding. By replacing extensive human preference annotation with structural inductive biases inherent to the task, SAFT offers a scalable path for stabilizing text-conditioned RL and underscores the broader value of incorporating task structure as a general inductive bias.

强化学习视觉语言模型奖励模型结构先验

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