ROOT: Discovering Rewards for User-Specified Embodied Behaviors

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Article Summary

Reinforcement learning for embodied control remains constrained by the difficulty of reward specification. Although recent large language model (LLM)-based methods can synthesize reward functions from natural-language descriptions, they often fail to capture subtle behavioral properties that humans care about, such as natural gait, posture, and movement style. This limitation arises because many desired behaviors are easier to recognize visually than to encode in a reward function. We introduce Reward Optimization via Observable Trees (ROOT), a framework for discovering reward functions that align learned policies with user-specified embodied behaviors. Rather than relying solely on scalar training statistics, ROOT casts reward design as an observation-guided search over a persistent experiment tree that stores reward programs, trained policies, and rollout observations, together with behavioral insights distilled by a video-language model, to diagnose behavioral failures and guide subsequent reward refinements. We evaluate ROOT on seven tasks across four embodiments: simulated Hopper, HalfCheetah, Ant, Unitree Go2, and as well as the real-world Unitree Go2. ROOT produces behaviors that better align with user intent than those generated by existing LLM-based reward-generation methods, achieving up to 86.8% locomotion-completeness accuracy and improving Vid-LLM behavioral alignment from 3.56/5 to 4.14/5, a 16.5% improvement over baselines. Human evaluations further support these results, with ROOT preferred in 51-63% of pairwise comparisons.

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