Kelsey R Allen

Aligning generative models with human preferences remains a central challenge. While RLHF is widely adopted, it relies on large-scale preference data. This limitation is particularly evident in evaluating instruction-guided image edits, even though humans can often learn such preferences from only a few examples. We present RewardHarness, a self-evolving agentic reward framework that reframes reward modeling as context evolution rather than weight optimization. Instead of learning from large-scale annotations, RewardHarness aligns with human preferences by iteratively evolving a library of tools and skills from as few as 100 preference demonstrations. Given a source image, an edited image, and an editing instruction, an orchestrator agent selects the most relevant subset of tools and skills from the maintained library, and sub-agents invoke them to construct a reasoning chain that produces a reward score. By comparing predicted scores with ground-truth preferences and analyzing successes and failures in the reasoning process, the orchestrator automatically refines the library of tools and skills without additional human annotation. Using only 0.05% of the EditReward preference data, RewardHarness achieves 47.4% average accuracy on EditReward-Bench K=2/3/4 and GenAI-Bench, surpassing GPT-5 by 5.3 points. When used as a reward signal in FlowGRPO, RL-tuned models achieve 3.52 on ImgEdit-Bench. Project page: https://rewardharness.com/

Recent work shows that pre-trained, instruction-tuned vision-language models (VLMs) perform well at mapping from instructions and observations to high-level plans, but struggle to realize such plans as reliable low-latency action sequences in unfamiliar environments. At the same time, world model controllers excel at fast observation-to-action control, but lack open-ended task guidance. In this work, we combine these strengths into a single system, Instruct-to-Act, where we train a world-model controller to act autonomously at high frequency when conditioned on sparse, higher latency, and high-level text instructions generated by a VLM planner. To train controllers to be language-instructable, we relabel segments of controller policy rollouts with synthetic instructions and jointly optimize a behavior-cloning objective along with existing reward-maximizing and world-modeling objectives. We evaluate our proposed approach across seven embodied environments, including three multi-agent environments where VLM planners coordinate through language while trained controllers serve as their actuators. Under matched observation and action spaces, our decoupled approach consistently outperforms controller-only and direct VLM action-generation variants, preserves fast control, and lets us swap in different pretrained VLM planners without fine-tuning, while remaining competitive with strong vision-language-action and multi-agent RL baselines on six of seven tasks.