RPMS: Enhancing LLM-Based Embodied Planning through Rule-Augmented Memory Synergy
Organizations: School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Abstract
LLM agents often fail in closed-world embodied environments because actions must satisfy strict preconditions -- such as location, inventory, and container states -- and failure feedback is sparse. We identify two structurally coupled failure modes: (P1) invalid action generation and (P2) state drift, each amplifying the other in a degenerative cycle. We present RPMS, a conflict-managed architecture that enforces action feasibility via structured rule retrieval, gates memory applicability via a lightweight belief state, and resolves conflicts between the two sources via rules-first arbitration. On ALFWorld (134 unseen tasks), RPMS achieves 59.7% single-trial success with Llama 3.1 8B (+23.9 pp over baseline) and 98.5% with Claude Sonnet 4.5 (+11.9 pp); of the 8B gain, rule retrieval alone contributes +14.9 pp (statistically significant), making it the dominant factor. A key finding is that episodic memory is conditionally useful: it harms performance on some task types when used without grounding, but becomes a stable net positive once filtered by current state and constrained by explicit action rules. Adapting RPMS to ScienceWorld with GPT-4 yields consistent gains across all ablation conditions (avg. score 54.0 vs. 44.9 for the ReAct baseline), providing transfer evidence that the core mechanisms hold across structurally distinct environments.
Figures & tables
| Model | Method | Succ. (%) | |
| Llama 3.1 8B | ReAct (Baseline) | 35.8 | — |
| RPMS (ours) | 59.7 | +23.9 | |
| Llama 3.1 70B | ReAct | 72.4 | — |
| RPMS | 88.1 | +15.7 | |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | ReAct | 86.6 | — |
| RPMS | 98.5 | +11.9 |
| Method | Look (18) | Place (24) | Clean (31) | Cool (21) | Heat (23) | Two (17) | All (134) |
| Baseline | 55.6 | 33.3 | 29.0 | 42.9 | 30.4 | 29.4 | 35.8 |
| Memory-only | 11.1 | 70.8 | 38.7 | 52.4 | 26.1 | 41.2 | 41.0 |
| Rules-only | 33.3 | 75.0 | 41.9 | 61.9 | 52.2 | 35.3 | 50.7 |
| Full RPMS | 66.7 | 79.2 | 54.8 | 47.6 | 65.2 | 41.2 | 59.7 |
| Condition | Rules | Mem. | Succ. | Rate |
| (A) Baseline | OFF | OFF | 48/134 | 35.8% |
| (C) Memory-only | OFF | ON | 55/134 | 41.0% |
| (B) Rules-only | ON | OFF | 68/134 | 50.7% |
| (D) Full RPMS | ON | ON | 80/134 | 59.7% |
| Arb. Mode | Succ. | Rate (%) |
| None | 64/134 | 47.8 |
| Soft-only | 71/134 | 53.0 |
| Hard-only | 74/134 | 55.2 |
| Hard+Soft | 80/134 | 59.7 |
| Condition | Rules | Mem. | Avg. Score |
| (A) Baseline | OFF | OFF | 44.9 |
| (C) Memory-only | OFF | ON | 46.0 |
| (B) Rules-only | ON | OFF | 51.3 |
| (D) Full RPMS | ON | ON | 54.0 |
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Method | Backbone / Agent | Regime | Trials | Reference | SR |
| BUTLER8 | Trained policy (IL / seq2seq) | Trained | best-of-8 | Shridhar et al. (2021) | 37 |
| ReAct | PaLM-540B / text-davinci-002 | Prompt-only | single-run | Yao et al. (2023) | 70.9/78.4 |
| Reflexion | GPT-3.5 | Prompt-only (iterative reflection) | 11 iter. | Shinn et al. (2023) | 97 |
| RAFA | GPT-4 | Prompt-only (iterative replanning) | 8 iter. | Liu et al. (2024) | 99 |
| A3T | Trained (self-training) | Trained | single-run | Yang et al. (2024) | 86–96 |
| Ours | Llama-3.1-8B | Prompt-only (rule+mem) | single-run | — | 59.7 |
| Method | Backbone | Regime | Split | Reference | Score |
| SwiftSage: ReAct | GPT-4 | Prompt-only (few-shot) | 30 tasks | Lin et al. (2023) | 36.4 |
| SwiftSage: Reflexion | GPT-4 | Prompt-only (iterative reflection) | 30 tasks | Lin et al. (2023) | 45.3 |
| Retrospex: IL-T5 | Flan-T5-large | Trained (IL) | 30 tasks | Xiang et al. (2024) | 48.8 |
| Retrospex | Flan-T5-large + RL | Trained (IL+RL) | 30 tasks | Xiang et al. (2024) | 56.0 |
| CLIN | GPT-4 | Continual memory update | 30 tasks | Majumder et al. (2024) | 59.8 |
| SwiftSage | SWIFT + SAGE (GPT-4) | Hybrid (BC + prompting) | 30 tasks | Lin et al. (2023) | 84.7 |
| Condition | Avg Steps (All) | Avg Steps (Succ.) |
| Baseline | 37.3 | 14.6 |
| Memory-only | 35.1 | 13.8 |
| Rules-only | 32.1 | 14.7 |
| Full RPMS | 30.9 | 14.0 |
| Failure Mode | Base | Mem | Rules | RPMS |
| Timeout (50 steps) | 86 | 79 | 27 | 18 |
| Env-done (wrong) | 0 | 0 | 39 | 36 |
| Total failed | 86 | 79 | 66 | 54 |
| Round | Entries | Mem-only (%) | Rules+Mem (%) |
| R0 (no mem) | 0 | 35.8 | 50.7 |
| R1 | 223 | 38.8 | 53.0 |
| R2 | 331 | 41.8 | 54.5 |
| R3 | 449 | 42.5 | 56.0 |
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