cs.AIJun 21, 2026

SCOPE: Evolving Symbolic World for Planning in Open-Ended Environments

Authors: Yundaichuan ZhanMinghe GaoZhongqi YueWendong BuWenqiao ZhangGuoming WangJisheng DangJuncheng Li+2 more

Organizations: Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China · Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden · Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

Abstract

Recent works have explored integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with classical planners that rely on symbolic representations of planning problems to generate long-horizon plans for complex embodied tasks. However, in open-ended environments, these symbolic representations obtained from perception are often incomplete, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we introduce SCOPE, a self-adaptive symbolic planning framework that supports refining action plans and evolving the symbolic world, i.e., the symbolic representations of open-ended environments. SCOPE comprises two synergistic modules: a Symbolic Execution Simulator (SESim) that conducts symbolic validation and real execution of action plans, leveraging the feedback to refine the plans and evolve the symbolic world; and a Self-Adaptive Symbolic Memory (SASMem) that further distills feedback into evolving symbolic knowledge to enhance long-horizon planning and modeling of the symbolic world. Experiments in open-ended environments show that SCOPE significantly improves the completeness of the symbolic world, the success rate of plans under environment perturbations, and cross-task grounding and adaptability across diverse embodied scenarios.

Explore similar work

Aug 1, 2026cs.RO

From Failures to Supervision: DynamicEnvPlan for Robust Long-Horizon Embodied Planning

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
Apr 20, 2026cs.RO

SYMBOLIZER: Symbolic Model-free Task Planning with VLMs

Traditional Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) systems depend on physics models for motion planning and discrete symbolic models for task planning. Although physics model are often available, symbolic models (consisting of symbolic state interpretation and action models) must be meticulously handcrafted or learned from labeled data. This process is both resource-intensive and constrains the solution to the specific domain, limiting scalability and adaptability. On the other hand, Visual Language Models (VLMs) show desirable zero-shot visual understanding (due to their extensive training on heterogeneous data), but still achieve limited planning capabilities. Therefore, integrating VLMs with classical planning for long-horizon reasoning in TAMP problems offers high potential. Recent works in this direction still lack generality and depend on handcrafted, task-specific solutions, e.g. describing all possible objects in advance, or using symbolic action models. We propose a framework that generalizes well to unseen problem instances. The method requires only lifted predicates describing relations among objects and uses VLMs to ground them from images to obtain the symbolic state. Planning is performed with domain-independent heuristic search using goal-count and width-based heuristics, without need for action models. Symbolic search over VLM-grounded state-space outperforms direct VLM-based planning and performs on par with approaches that use a VLM-derived heuristic. This shows that domain-independent search can effectively solve problems across domains with large combinatorial state spaces. We extensively evaluate on extensively evaluate our method and achieve state-of-the-art results on the ProDG and ViPlan benchmarks.
Sami Azirar, Zlatan Ajanovic, Hermann Blum
Aug 8, 2026cs.AI

GraphThink: Graph-Enhanced LLM Thinking for Long-Horizon Embodied Task Planning

Embodied agents using LLM-based planners often struggle with physical hallucinations, poor generalization to long-horizon tasks, and lack of environmental awareness. We propose GraphThink, a novel framework that integrates a task graph to provide structured knowledge for robust planning and a scene graph to maintain environmental memory for event-driven replanning. Specifically, the task graph guides LLM thinking through contextual prompting and iterative refinement, effectively mitigating planning hallucinations. Furthermore, within the GRPO framework, the task graph offers delicate reward design to train the LLM planner, enhancing long-horizon planning capabilities and improving generalization. Finally, an event-driven replanning module, powered by the scene graph, enables closed-loop environment awareness and error correction. GraphThink achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ALFRED benchmark. In particular, our high-level planner surpasses leading API-based LLMs on both the validation set and held-out long-horizon tasks, underscoring its robust zero-shot and few-shot capabilities. Additional evaluations further demonstrate strong out-of-distribution generalization to novel tasks and environments.
Chen Li, Sijie Cheng, Yuelin Zhang +4