SOLE-R1: Video-Language Reasoning as the Sole Reward for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning
Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, motivating efforts to leverage these models to supervise robot learning. However, when used as evaluators in reinforcement learning (RL), today's strongest models often fail under partial observability and distribution shift, enabling policies to exploit perceptual errors rather than solve the task. We introduce SOLE-R1 (Self-Observing LEarner), a video-language reasoning model explicitly designed to serve as the sole reward signal for online RL. Given only raw video observations and a natural-language goal, SOLE-R1 performs per-timestep spatiotemporal chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and produces dense...
| Authors | Philip Schroeder, Thomas Weng, Karl Schmeckpeper et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.RO |
| Published | 30 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 May 2026 |
Models and datasets referencing this paper
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.