arXiv AI

Policy Learning with a Language Bottleneck

Policy Learning with a Language Bottleneck (PLLB) is a framework that lets AI agents generate linguistic rules to describe high‑level strategies. PLLB alternates between rule generation, guided by language models, and policy updates that use these rules, even when a single rule cannot fully capture a complex policy. Experiments on five tasks—including a signaling game, maze navigation, image reconstruction, and robot grasp planning—show that PLLB agents learn more interpretable, generalizable behaviors and can share rules with humans for better coordination.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Decoupling Planning and Control for Instructable Agents

The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples planning and control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them at high frequency, trained via relabeling rollouts with synthetic instructions and joint optimization of behavior cloning, reward, and world‑model objectives. Across seven embodied environments—including multi‑agent settings—this approach outperforms controller‑only and direct VLM action methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning, achieving competitive results with strong baselines on most tasks.

By Zineng Tang, Kelsey R. Allen, Sjoerd van Steenkiste, Ishita Dasgupta, Alane Suhr
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 27

Decoupling Planning and Control for Instructable Agents

The paper introduces Instruct-to-Act, a system that decouples high‑level planning from low‑latency control by combining a vision‑language model (VLM) planner with a world‑model controller. The VLM generates sparse, high‑level text instructions, while the controller executes them autonomously at high frequency. Experiments across seven embodied environments, including multi‑agent settings, show that this approach outperforms both controller‑only and direct VLM action‑generation methods, maintains fast control, and allows swapping in different pretrained VLM planners without fine‑tuning.

arXiv AI
Sep 23

Synthesizing Reactive Character Behaviors for Continuous Games via Programmatic Policy Search

The paper introduces a method for creating reactive character behaviors in continuous games as compact, human‑readable programs. It searches over a domain‑specific language that uses reactive geometric decisions and higher‑order constructs to discretize continuous behavior space, while eliminating redundant program forms through synthesis antipatterns. The approach, called agentic sketching, combines bottom‑up symbolic enumeration with top‑down guidance from a coding agent, and outperforms either technique alone on a benchmark of 14 continuous games.

By Maxim Gumin, Hsueh-Ti Derek Liu, Victor Zordan, Daniel Ritchie
arXiv AI
Jul 28

A Few Words Go a Long Way: Language Guided Robot Policy Synthesis

arXiv:2607. 23784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail.

By Daphne Chen, Archit Ritesh Jain, Eric Goossen, Emma Romig, Michael Murray, Nick Walker, Maya Cakmak
arXiv AI
Jun 2

From Demonstrations to Rewards: Test-Time Prompt Optimization for VLM Reward Models

arXiv:2606. 00083v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning relies on accurate reward functions, which are often hand-crafted or even unavailable in real-world applications, such as robotics.

By Christian Gumbsch, Leonardo Barcellona, Lennard Sch\"unemann, Platon Karageorgis, Andrii Zadaianchuk, Zehao Wang, Sergey Zakharov, Fabien Despinoy, Rahaf Aljundi, Efstratios Gavves