PILOT: Guiding Long-Horizon World-Model Planning for Robot Manipulation with Visual Subgoals and Policy Priors

Latent world-model planning has shown promising results in goal-conditioned robotic manipulation, but remains challenging for long-horizon planning due to limited temporal guidance and inefficient action search. A distant visual goal provides little guidance for preparatory actions, while uninformed action sampling makes local optimization inefficient. We propose PILOT (Policy-Initialized Local Optimization with Temporal subgoals), which uses a video model to generate intermediate visual subgoals and a learned policy to initialize the cross-entropy method (CEM). CEM refines candidate action sequences toward each subgoal using an action-conditioned world model in a receding-horizon control loop. In our primary real-robot evaluation across four UR5e manipulation tasks, PILOT achieves 68.8% success, compared with 55.0% without policy initialization, 13.8% for policy-only execution, and 0.0% for direct final-goal planning. Simulation results show that these gains persist over longer horizons: PILOT exceeds direct execution of the same policy by 30 percentage points on long Push-T tasks and by 22 percentage points on LIBERO-10. Policy initialization also accelerates local optimization: on Push-T, CEM matches the cost reached by generic initialization after 10 iterations in only 4 iterations and reduces the final planning cost by 24.1% under the same sampling budget. These results show that combining temporal subgoals with policy-guided action search improves both long-horizon task execution and local planning efficiency. Videos are available on the webpage: https://pilot-planner.github.io/.