OpenRAL/rskill-topreward_qwen3vl_4b-any-general-nf4
rskill-toprewardqwen3vl4b-any-general-nf4
OpenRAL rSkill — TOPReward (Token Probabilities as Hidden Zero-Shot Rewards for Robotics) packaged as an NF4rewardrSkill on top of lerobot 0.6.0's first-party TOPReward. It is a zero-shot reward: it asks an off-the-shelf Qwen3-VL-4B VLM how likely the task instruction is, conditioned on the rollout video, and readslog P("True")back as the signal. Per-frame progress (0–1) comes from a prefix sweep. No actuators. Advisory-only. Apache-2.0 packaging (upstream method MIT; Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct weights are also Apache-2.0).
Preview
Per-frame progress overlay on LIBERO `libero_object` episode 0 — task "pick up the orange juice and place it in the basket" — scored live with the NF4 Qwen3-VL-4B backbone (peak 3.13 GB, RTX 4070 Laptop 8 GB):
HF model cards render images but do not embed HTML5<video>, so the three frames above (start / middle / end) stand in for the clip. The full overlay video is [`media/progress.mp4`](media/progress.mp4) in this repo (143 frames, downloadable). Regenerate everything withtools/topreward_per_frame_demo.py --media-dir media.
Quick Start
ral skill install hf://OpenRAL/rskill-topreward_qwen3vl_4b-any-general-nf4from openral_core.schemas import RSkillManifest
manifest = RSkillManifest.from_yaml("rskills/topreward-qwen3vl-4b-nf4/rskill.yaml")
assert manifest.kind == "reward"
assert manifest.role == "s2"
assert manifest.reward.progress_range == (0.0, 1.0)What It Does
Runs parallel to a VLA policy and scores the rollout so the Reasoner can tell whether a skill is making progress or is done — without any hand-written success detector. Given the rollout's RGB frames plus the task instruction it produces a per-frame normalized progress signal in [0, 1], queried on demand by the Reasoner. It never actuates and never gates motors; its output is advisory input to the replanning ladder.
Why a reward model alongside the VLA
The VLA emits actions but no notion of "am I done / am I stuck". TOPReward fills that gap zero-shot — no reward head to train, no per-task labels. Because it is a frozen general VLM prompted with the instruction, it transfers across embodiments and tasks, at the cost of an uncalibrated (per-episode min-max) scale rather than a physically-calibrated success bar.
How it works — architecture and upstream model
TOPReward's model (lerobot.rewards.topreward.TOPRewardModel) wraps transformers' Qwen3VLForConditionalGeneration. It builds the prompt
<video> The above video shows a robot manipulation trajectory that completes the
following task: <instruction> Decide whether the above statement is True or not.
The answer is: Truelabel-masks all but the final token, and returns log P("True" | video, instruction) as one clip-level scalar.
Per-frame progress is lerobot's native prefix sweep (lerobot.rewards.topreward.compute_rabc_weights): score growing trajectory prefixes frames[0:k] at a set of anchor lengths, min-max normalise the raw log-probs per episode, then interpolate back to one value per frame — a [0, 1] progress curve. The OpenRAL runtime feeds this the same rolling RGB buffer the co-active VLA uses.
- Backbone:
Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct(zero-shot; no fine-tuned weights). - Quantization: NF4 (bitsandbytes, double-quant, bf16 compute). lerobot's
TOPRewardModelloads bf16 with no quant knob, so the OpenRAL backend subclasses it to inject aBitsAndBytesConfig(seetools/topreward_per_frame_demo.py::NF4TOPRewardModel). - transformers: 5.x works directly — no version downgrade pin.
Runtime
Inference contract
Each prefix forward is capped to 8 frames (evenly tail-cropped) to bound the Qwen3-VL video activation on 8 GB.
Validated live
Run on RTX 4070 Laptop (8 GB) against real LIBERO libero_object episode 0 (143 frames, a success demo) via tools/topreward_per_frame_demo.py:
Supported robots and embodiments
Embodiment-agnostic (embodiment_tags: ["any"]). A reward monitor scores any rollout video + task instruction, so it is exempt from the rSkill↔robot embodiment gate. Validated on a Franka Panda LIBERO scene; nothing about the model is Franka-specific.
Sensors and Observation Contract
Consumes one RGB camera stream (modality: rgb, ≥ 224×224) — the same frames the co-active VLA observes. No actuators required. The instruction string is supplied by the Reasoner from the active task.
Manifest Summary
See `rskill.yaml` for the full manifest.
License
rSkill packaging is Apache-2.0 (all OpenRAL code is uniformly Apache-2.0). The TOPReward method is MIT. The wrapped Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct weights are also Apache-2.0 (Qwen/Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct, license: apache-2.0), so an NF4-quantized copy is freely redistributable — the whole stack is Apache-2.0 / MIT. Cite the TOPReward paper (Chen et al., 2026).
