Reward Evolution with Graph-of-Thoughts: A Bi-Level Language Model Framework for Reinforcement Learning

Designing effective reward functions remains a major challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), often requiring considerable human expertise and iterative refinement. Recent advances leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated reward design, but these approaches are limited by hallucinations, reliance on human feedback, and challenges with handling complex, multi-step tasks. In this work, we introduce Reward Evolution with Graph-of-Thoughts (RE-GoT), a novel bi-level framework that enhances LLMs with structured graph-based reasoning and integrates Visual Language Models (VLMs) for automated rollout evaluation. RE-GoT first decomposes tasks into text-attributed graphs, enabling comprehensive analysis and reward function generation, and then iteratively refines rewards using visual feedback from VLMs without human intervention. Extensive experiments on 10 RoboGen and 4 ManiSkill2 tasks demonstrate that RE-GoT consistently outperforms existing LLM-based baselines. On RoboGen, our method improves average task success rates by 32.25%, with notable gains on complex multi-step tasks. On ManiSkill2, RE-GoT achieves an average success rate of 93.73% across four diverse manipulation tasks, significantly surpassing prior LLM-based approaches and even exceeding expert-designed rewards. Our results indicate that combining LLMs and VLMs with graph-of-thoughts reasoning provides a scalable and effective solution for autonomous reward evolution in RL.

Age Estimation Based on Graph Convolutional Networks and Multi-head Attention Mechanisms

Age estimation technology is a part of facial recognition and has been applied to identity authentication. This technology achieves the development and application of a juvenile anti-addiction system by authenticating users in the game. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Transformer algorithms are widely used in this application scenario. However, these two models cannot flexibly extract and model features of faces with irregular shapes, and they are ineffective in capturing key information. Furthermore, the above methods will contain a lot of background information while extracting features, which will interfere with the model. In consequence, it is easy to extract redundant information from images. In this paper, a new modeling idea is proposed to solve this problem, which can flexibly model irregular objects. The Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) is used to extract features from irregular face images effectively, and multi-head attention mechanisms are added to avoid redundant features and capture key region information in the image. This model can effectively improve the accuracy of age estimation and reduce the MAE error value to about 3.64, which is better than the effect of today's age estimation model, to improve the accuracy of face recognition and identity authentication.