Learning Manipulation Skills through Robot Chain-of-Thought with Sparse Failure Guidance

Reward engineering for policy learning has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Recently, to avoid manual reward designs, vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise in defining rewards for teaching robots manipulation skills. However, existing work often provides reward guidance that is too coarse, leading to insufficient learning processes. In this paper, we address this issue by implementing more fine-grained reward guidance. Specifically, we decompose tasks into simpler sub-tasks, using this decomposition to offer more informative reward guidance with VLMs. We also propose a VLM-based self imitation learning process to speed up learning. Empirical evidence demonstrates that our algorithm consistently outperforms baselines such as CLIP, LIV, and RoboCLIP. Specifically, our algorithm achieves a 5:4 higher average success rates compared to the best baseline, RoboCLIP, across a series of manipulation tasks.