GTR: Guided Thought Reinforcement Prevents Thought Collapse in RL-based VLM Agent Training
Reinforcement learning with verifiable outcome rewards (RLVR) has effectively scaled up chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Yet, its efficacy in training vision-language model (VLM) agents for goal-directed action reasoning in visual environments is less established. This work investigates this problem through extensive experiments on complex card games, such as 24 points, and embodied tasks from ALFWorld. We find that when rewards are based solely on action outcomes, RL fails to incentivize CoT reasoning in VLMs, instead leading to a phenomenon we termed thought collapse, characterized by a rapid loss of diversity in the agent's thoughts, state-irrelevant and incomplete reasoning, and subsequent invalid actions, resulting in negative rewards. To counteract thought collapse, we highlight the necessity of process guidance and propose an automated corrector that evaluates and refines the agent's reasoning at each RL step. This simple and scalable GTR (Guided Thought Reinforcement) framework trains reasoning and action simultaneously without the need for dense, per-step human labeling. Our experiments demonstrate that GTR significantly enhances the performance and generalization of the LLaVA-7b model across various visual environments, achieving 3-5 times higher task success rates compared to SoTA models with notably smaller model sizes.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Card GamesSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
History-Aware Cross-Attention Reinforcement: Self-Supervised Multi Turn and Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning with vLLM
We present CAGSR-vLLM-MTC, an extension of our Self-Supervised Cross-Attention-Guided Reinforcement (CAGSR) framework, now implemented on the high-performance vLLM runtime, to address both multi-turn dialogue and chain-o…
Faithful Mobile GUI Agents with Guided Advantage Estimator
Vision-language model based graphical user interface (GUI) agents have shown strong interaction capabilities. However, they often behave unfaithfully, relying on memorized shortcuts rather than grounding actions in displ…
Thinking on the Fly: Test-Time Reasoning Enhancement via Latent Thought Policy Optimization
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shifted from explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to more efficient latent reasoning, where intermediate thoughts are represented as vectors rather than text.…
Text GenerationSPINE: Token-Selective Test-Time Reinforcement Learning with Entropy-Band Regularization
Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLL-Ms) excel at chain-of-thought reasoning but face distribution shift at test-time and a lack of verifiable supervision. Recent test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) …
Reinforcement LearningTest-time AdaptationThe Weight of Silence: A Causal Case for Weights Over the Scratchpad in Latent Chess Reasoning
Latent, or silent, reasoning lets language models carry out intermediate computation in continuous vector space instead of words, and is widely assumed to function as an internal scratchpad the model actively consults du…
Reinforcement Learning