MORAL: A Multimodal Reinforcement Learning Framework for Decision Making in Autonomous Laboratories

Abstract: We propose MORAL (a multimodal reinforcement learning framework for decision making in autonomous laboratories) that enhances sequential decision-making in autonomous robotic laboratories through the integration of visual and textual inputs. Using the BridgeData V2 dataset, we generate fine-tuned image captions with a pretrained BLIP-2 vision-LLM and combine them with visual features through an early fusion strategy. The fused representations are processed using Deep Q-Network (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agents. Experimental results demonstrate that multimodal agents achieve a 20% improvement in task completion rates and significantly outperform visual-only and textual-only baselines after sufficient training. Compared to transformer-based and recurrent multimodal RL models, our approach achieves superior performance in cumulative reward and caption quality metrics (BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE-L). These results highlight the impact of semantically aligned language cues in enhancing agent learning efficiency and generalization. The proposed framework contributes to the advancement of multimodal reinforcement learning and embodied AI systems in dynamic, real-world environments.