Self-Evolutionary Replanning for Failure-Aware Motion Planning
Authors: Guoliang Li, Ruihua Han, Chengyang Li, He Li, Shuai Wang, Wenchao Ding, Hong Zhang, Chengzhong Xu
Organizations: Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau · Department of Computer Science, University of Hong Kong · SIAT, Chinese Academy of Sciences · Academy for Engineering & Technology, Fudan University · Department of EEE, Southern University of Science and Technology
Motion planners tuned under nominal conditions can fail when execution conditions change. Existing differentiable adaptation methods provide efficient online updates but remain constrained by static loss functions and gradient-only parameter updates. We propose Self-Evolutionary RePlanning (SERP), a failure-aware framework that jointly adapts motion-planner parameters and loss function weights from closed-loop execution feedback. SERP provides two adaptation mechanisms. First, in-context learning with auto-differentiation (ILAD) enables rapid online adaptation by coupling local numerical refinement with history-conditioned semantic intervention. Auto-differentiation performs numerical updates, while a vision-language model (VLM) interprets recent adaptation history to jointly revise planner parameters and loss weights when local adaptation becomes ineffective. Second, the memory-augmented rollout system (MARS) extends ILAD into a deliberative and evolutionary recovery process with memory-guided candidate generation and parallel low-fidelity rollout evaluation. The resulting recovery trace is then consolidated into recovery memory to guide future adaptation. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate improved failure recovery performance over various baselines across diverse environments.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Comparison of planner adaptation methods.
Fig. 2 : Overview of SERP, which consists of ILAD and MARS.
Fig. 3 : IR-SIM scenario profiles.
Fig. 4 : Qualitative comparison in a 50-obstacle uniform-random IR-SIM scene.
Metric
Method
SFM
ORCA
NeuPAN
DiffTune
SERP
[ 28 ]
[ 29 ]
[ 7 ]
[ 6 ]
-
30 obstacles
AvgSpeed ↑
2.299
1.938
3.018
3.023
2.870
AvgAcc ↓
1.015
0.828
0.410
0.479
0.774
AvgEpoch ↓
–
–
–
3.610
2.750
TABLE I: Quantitative Comparison in the IR-SIM simulator. Purple denotes the best performance.
Fig. 5 : Qualitative comparison in Habitat simulator.
Method
AvgEpoch ↓
TotTime ↓
ColRate ↓
SucRate ↑
SERP
2.66
43.75
2.0%
94.0%
SERP w/o IL
3.82
43.66
20.0%
74.0%
SERP w/o AD
3.22
48.47
4.0%
84.0%
TABLE II: Ablation study of SERP. Purple denotes the best performance.
Method
AvgEpoch ↓
TotTime ↓
ColRate ↓
SucRate ↑
SERP
4.06
74.72
1.7%
87.7%
DiffTune [ 6 ]
4.48
49.46
4.7%
77.0%
SERP w/o MARS
4.35
55.90
2.7%
81.3%
TABLE III: Quantitative comparison in the Habitat simulator. Purple denotes the best performance.
Fig. 6 : Analysis of SERP in the Habitat simulator.
Fig. 7 : Experimental setup.
Fig. 8 : Trajectory and control profiles of SERP.
Fig. 9 : Replanning in the cluttered laboratory.
Door
# Obstacles
Success
Navigation Time (s)
Speed Avg./Std (m/s)
Acc. Avg./Std (m/s 2 )
w/ SERP
w/o SERP
w/ SERP
w/o SERP
w/ SERP
w/o SERP
w/ SERP
w/o SERP
Open
2
✔
✔
10.78
11.13
0.415 / 0.166
0.396 / 0.179
0.487 / 1.587
0.636 / 1.875
Open
4
✔
✔
10.97
11.46
0.419 / 0.151
0.392 / 0.172
0.484 / 1.218
0.418 / 0.899
Open
6
✔
✔
11.42
11.70
0.416 / 0.131
0.405 / 0.180
0.537 / 0.988
0.485 / 1.625
Almost Closed
2
✔
✗
19.55
–
0.274 / 0.212
–
0.405 / 1.281
–
Almost Closed
4
✔
✗
14.46
–
0.378 / 0.151
–
0.651 / 1.754
–
TABLE IV : Ablation study of SERP in real experiments.
Physical-world interaction is inherently dynamic, as environments can evolve during execution, requiring agents to adapt their plans under non-stationary conditions. We study this challenge through long-horizon embodied planning under environment deviations and execution uncertainty. Existing embodied-task benchmarks can expose such failures, but these failures are usually treated as evaluation outcomes instead of learnable signals for training agents to recover. In this work, we introduce DynamicEnvPlan, a closed-loop framework for high-level planning in dynamic environments. It extends embodied task execution with humanoid agents, high-level primitive skills, structured semantic memory, and controllable perturbations. Our data synthesis design consists of planning, perturbation, and guarded correction modules that turn dynamic execution states into recovery-oriented traces. The resulting traces are used for staged supervised fine-tuning, enabling the planner to learn from both nominal execution and perturbed recovery trajectories. Using 104 task-scene combinations spanning i.i.d., compositional generalization, and out-of-distribution settings for fine-tuning and evaluation, DynamicEnvPlan boosts success rate from 33.3% for the base planner to 76.2%, while improving across all seven evaluation metrics critical to physical-world interaction, including safety and affordance compliance.
Hao Yuan, Yuxin Wang, Lei Ji +1
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · †Independent researchers. · 3Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)
Neural Motion Planners (NMPs) enable fast reactive motion generation, but adapting them to new environments typically requires recollecting large expert datasets, which is computationally prohibitive. We propose ELMP, a framework for data-efficient adaptation via self-supervised fine-tuning. Rather than generating additional expert trajectories with expensive global planners, ELMP directly optimizes the policy through a differentiable kinematic layer using dense collision, target-reaching, and smoothness objectives. This replaces expert data generation with rapid problem sampling, reducing per-sample adaptation cost by roughly two orders of magnitude. To further support robust generalization across changing kinematic chains, we introduce a mechanism to explicitly encode tool geometry via point clouds. Benchmarked against classical and neural baselines, ELMP achieves an 84.8% average success rate with orders-of-magnitude lower cold-start latency than classical methods. In unseen environments, self-supervised fine-tuning improves success rate from 57.3% (zero-shot) to 89.8%, removing the data collection bottleneck. Our approach maintains millisecond-level inference latency and is validated on a physical Franka Emika Panda robot.
Neural world models coupled with model predictive control (MPC) replan at every environment step to bound accumulated prediction error, but this incurs substantial computational overhead. Reusing a cached plan reduces this overhead, yet its effectiveness depends on how prediction mismatch propagates through the local dynamics. We analyze this trade-off with a perturbation-based dynamic-regret framework and show that stale-plan penalties scale with the reuse tolerance, the accumulated mismatch since the last replanning step, and the local dynamics sensitivity. Based on this structure, we propose AdaReP, a training-free wrapper that adapts the replanning tolerance online using the current deviation from the cached rollout and a local sensitivity estimate, without modifying the learned world model or planner. Across image-space planning, latent-space control, and real-world robotic manipulation, AdaReP substantially reduces planner-side computation while maintaining comparable task performance, including over 80% fewer queries on a 50-trial physical robot study.
Yutian Cheng, Xiaojian Ma, Xianhao Wang +6
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI) · University of Science and Technology of China