Hybrid Advantage Estimation with Unified Critic for VLM Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) now act as agents in interactive environments, where success requires coherent reasoning and decision-making across turns. Although end-to-end training in agentic environments can improve such multi-turn decision-making abilities, current methods mainly rely on either token-wise optimization over concatenated token trajectories or turn-wise optimization with uniform within-turn credit. In this work, we establish theoretical formulations for the two levels of optimization and derive a hybrid advantage that serves both objectives. Furthermore, with an appropriate choice of discount factor and learning target, we prove that a unified critic model can estimate values for both turn-wise and token-wise. As such, we propose HyGAE, an actor-critic framework that jointly optimizes token- and turn-level objectives with the hybrid advantage and unified critic. We conduct extensive evaluations of HyGAE across five multi-turn decision-making environments, where it achieves an average success rate of 91% and a significant improvement of 10% over other methods. Furthermore, we provide an in-depth analysis showing that the exact analytic form of the hybrid advantage and return is crucial for optimization. Project Page: https://wx-zhang.github.io/hygae-web/.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Enhancing Steering Estimation with Semantic-Aware GNNs
Steering estimation is a critical task in autonomous driving, traditionally relying on 2D image-based models. In this work, we explore the advantages of incorporating 3D spatial information through hybrid architectures t…
Autonomous Drivinggraph constructionGraph Neural NetworkBADGER: Bridging Agentic and Deterministic Evaluation for Generative Enterprise Reasoning
Enterprise AI systems that translate natural language into SQL queries and orchestrate multi-step agentic reasoning pipelines require evaluation approaches fundamentally different from academic benchmarks. Spider and BIR…
Group-Graph Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Group-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly enhanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in agentic scenarios. To achieve finer-grained policy updates, recent agentic RL frameworks have shifted from trajectory-lev…
Reinforcement LearningAutoForge: Automated Environment Synthesis for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Conducting reinforcement learning (RL) in simulated environments offers a cost-effective and highly scalable way to enhance language-based agents. However, previous work has been limited to semi-automated environment syn…
Reinforcement LearningDomain GeneralizationTransforming the Hybrid Cloud for Emerging AI Workloads
This white paper, developed through close collaboration between IBM Research and UIUC researchers within the IIDAI Institute, envisions transforming hybrid cloud systems to meet the growing complexity of AI workloads thr…
Model Optimizationscientific discoveryWeather Forecasting