arXiv AI By Matteo Merler, Giovanni Bonetta, Davide Zago, Rossella Cancelliere, Bernardo Magnini

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

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The paper introduces SAGE, a framework that selectively queries a Vision‑Language Model (VLM) teacher only when the learner is uncertain, using the teacher’s suggestions to guide training and distill them into a lightweight reinforcement learning policy. SAGE weights teacher actions by environment‑derived advantages, allowing the policy to improve beyond the imperfect VLM. Experiments on sparse‑reward visual reasoning and navigation tasks show that the learned policies can act without VLM guidance at evaluation, reduce VLM usage during training, and sometimes outperform the teacher itself.

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