Action-Conditioned Planning

Deep research tasks require agents to navigate large knowledge spaces, synthesize evidence across many sources, and adapt their plans as findings emerge. Directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based multi-agent systems suit this setting because they support parallel execution and isolate each sub-task within a focused dependency context. Yet existing DAG-based agents instantiate a task-level plan before execution and repair the graph only after failures or missing evidence are observed. This Plan-then-Patch strategy is brittle for deep research: the system commits most strongly when its evidence is weakest, and later revisions waste computation on branches that should not have been planned. We propose DAGent, a DAG-based multi-agent framework with Evaluate-then-Grow incremental planning: an Orchestrator grows the task graph one batch at a time, conditioning each expansion on confidence and uncertainty signals from completed nodes. A hierarchical context layer propagates compact QueryDocs by default while preserving full execution traces for on-demand recall. The recorded DAG topology admits structural RL signals that outcome-only recipes cannot define; DAGRPO, a GRPO adaptation, injects topology-conditioned credit on Executor rollouts and a structural compliance regularization on Orchestrator plans. Across BrowseComp-Plus, GAIA, and xbench-DeepSearch, DAGent surpasses the strongest open-source baseline by 5.3 / 5.8 / 2.0 points at the Qwen3-235B-A22B scale, and the lead replicates across four open-source backbones and extends to GPT-5 at 327K context. At the Qwen3-8B scale, DAGRPO improves over a same-budget outcome-only GRPO baseline by 3.0 average Pass@1 points. A same-architecture comparison shows that evidence-conditioned planning reaches higher accuracy at lower per-task token, tool-call, and step footprints than its Plan-then-Patch counterpart. Code: https://github.com/hanwenliu6825/DAGent

Robotic foundation models offer a promising path toward general-purpose humanoid robot control, often through hierarchical architectures. However, their effectiveness depends on the command interface between the planner and the controller, which must support accurate execution while remaining easy to predict, and ideally allow new behaviors to be composed from prior ones. In this work, we introduce spectral skills, a latent representation of this interface that meets these requirements through predictive representation learning. By design, spectral skills compactly encode short motion segments and are learned by predicting subsequent motion rather than reconstructing the encoder input. On a 29-DoF humanoid, a controller conditioned on spectral skills reduces global tracking error by 62% relative to the state of the art. The same frozen controller chains independently encoded skills without a separate transition policy. It also composes new behaviors by adding orthogonal directions to any compatible base skill, producing combinations unseen in the training data. We demonstrate tracking, chaining, and composition, as well as control through a language-conditioned planner, on Unitree G1 hardware. Project page: https://spectral-skill.github.io

Autonomous driving requires \textit{world models} that can understand the physical world, reason and plan, and operate safely. In this paper, we first systematically evaluate existing action-conditioned joint-embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) world models, including LeWM, DINO-WM, and JEPA-WM for end-to-end autonomous driving (E2EAD). To isolate world-model quality from policy learning, we employ a goal-conditioned zero-shot planning setting that evaluates these models using ground-truth future observations as goals, without training any driving policy. We find that existing JEPA-based world models are either accurate for driving but computationally expensive, or computationally efficient but insufficient for planning. To address this trade-off, we propose \textbf{AD-E2E-JEPA}, which introduces a SIGReg-regularized learnable projector applied to projected patch embeddings. The projector reduces the number of planning patches by $16\times$ and the embedding dimension by $4\times$, achieving a $100\times$ inference speedup while retaining planning performance, with a 0.8-second runtime for an 8-frame rollout over 256 candidate trajectories. \textit{Without} training any driving policy, the world model itself reaches the goals located 20 meters away on average within the displacement of respectively 4.0/2.8 meters, using world-model rollouts over trajectory vocabularies of respectively 256/8,192 candidates. On the NAVSIMv2 benchmark, it achieves 67.3/72.9 EPDMS with multiplicative safety metrics and 84.1/86.5 EPDMS$^{\dagger}$ without them in goal-conditioned zero-shot planning. Experiments further show that the self-supervised pretrained projector improves downstream imitation learning performance from 80.2 to 85.4 EPDMS. The source code is available at https://github.com/HaoranZhuExplorer/AD-E2E-JEPA

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have emerged as a principled framework for self-supervised learning of world models in compact latent spaces, yet existing methods are fragmented: some predict masked parts of a single image in latent space (I-JEPA), others learn to predict global photometric transformations (Image World Models), while video-scale JEPAs predict future temporal states and are post-trained for action-conditioned planning (V-JEPA~2, DINO-World, DINO-WM). These objectives are treated as distinct recipes with separate encoders, predictors, and anti-collapse regularizers, hindering a single model from unifying image-level and video-level world modeling. We present UniJEPA, a unified JEPA that jointly learns photometric prediction (image-level transformations) and temporal prediction (video-level next-state dynamics) in one shared latent space. A single end-to-end objective, composed of a next-embedding prediction loss and a Gaussian regularizer, yields a provably anti-collapse encoder-predictor pair trainable from raw pixels without EMA, stop-gradient, or pre-trained encoders. We show that the same latent space supports controllable abstraction: photometric prediction learns invariant structure while temporal prediction learns equivariant dynamics. After action-conditioned post-training on offline trajectories, UniJEPA enables zero-shot planning by treating goal features as prediction targets. On image, video, and control benchmarks, UniJEPA matches or surpasses task-specific JEPAs while requiring a single loss hyperparameter, and plans up to tens of times faster than generative world models at comparable accuracy.

Latent world models have emerged as a powerful planning paradigm by learning action-conditioned predictive dynamics and using them as internal simulators to imagine and evaluate candidate action sequences. However, as the planning horizon grows, performance becomes increasingly constrained by proposal quality: a fixed candidate budget must search an exponentially larger action space, making it difficult to expose the world model to high-quality candidate futures for evaluation. In this paper, we introduce SAGE, a prior-conditioned planner that replaces random proposal initialization with structured guidance. At each planning stage, a goal-conditioned generator predicts the next intermediate latent subgoal for a specified duration, which is then used to condition the generation of candidate action sequences. To capture semantic information across temporal scales, we use subgoals of varying durations as priors, balancing fine-grained local control with higher-level long-horizon progress. Then the frozen world model evaluates these proposals against the same subgoal and guides their refinement before execution. Experiments on PushT and OGBench Cube show that coupling latent subgoal decomposition with prior-conditioned action generation substantially improves long-horizon planning while preserving strong short-horizon performance. To be specific, when the target offset is $150$, it raises PushT success from $4.7\%$ to $64.7\%$ and OGBench Cube success from $20.7\%$ to $67.3\%$. We further extend latent world-model planning to LIBERO, where SAGE improves full-episode success from $0\%$ with the vanilla LeWM planner to $48.7\%$ on Scene2 and $58\%$ on Caddy.

Recent VLM and VLA systems have improved robotic perception and action prediction, yet long-horizon embodied agents still require a general runtime layer for reasoning, memory, tool use, verification, and cross-embodiment execution. We present ABot-AgentOS, a general robotic Agent Operating System that sits above low-level controllers and provides a deliberative agent layer for scene-conditioned planning, context-isolated skill execution, multi-stage verification, multi-modal memory, and edge-cloud collaboration. To evaluate such systems, we introduce EmbodiedWorldBench, an executable benchmark with 16 indoor, outdoor, and hybrid scenes, four difficulty levels, and over 200 tasks involving navigation, object search, NPC dialogue, dynamic events, and trace-grounded scoring. ABot-AgentOS further introduces Universal Multi-modal Graph Memory, a persistent source-grounded substrate that converts dialogue, visual observations, spatial context, temporal relations, and task traces into typed nodes and edges. A failure-driven self-evolution loop converts diagnosed memory failures into gated runtime evo-assets that are promoted only to later evaluation splits, preventing current-split ground-truth leakage while enabling continual improvement. On an initial EmbodiedWorldBench subset, ABot-AgentOS improves over a single-controller baseline in both task success and goal completion. Across memory benchmarks, ABot-AgentOS Static achieves 87.5 on LoCoMo, 59.9 on OpenEQA EM-EQA, 88.6 on Mem-Gallery, and 76.5 Acc@All on NExT-QA; self-evolution further improves LoCoMo to 88.7, OpenEQA to 60.4, and Mem-Gallery to 89.0. These results suggest that a general Agent OS layer can improve long-horizon embodied execution while providing persistent, auditable memory for continual interaction.

Multi-hop question answering remains challenging for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) because existing approaches either propagate errors across iterative retrieval rounds or over-generate reasoning steps, increasing cost without improving accuracy. We propose Grounded Delta Planning RAG (GDP-RAG), a plan-based framework that targets only the information delta based on three simple design choices: (1) preliminary retrieval to ground planning before execution, (2) a gap-conditioned planning prompt that asks only for missing information, and (3) a skeletal trajectory that pairs each subquery with a Thought capturing evidence from preliminary retrieval and carrying it through to the final answer. GDP-RAG focuses computation on unresolved gaps, yielding concise, reliable reasoning trajectories. Extensive experiments on HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MuSiQue show that GDP-RAG achieves the highest accuracy (60.63%) among all compared systems while maintaining a cost-of-pass of 0.51, 22% lower than PAR-RAG (0.65) and 68% lower than KnowTrace (1.57), with no method achieving both higher accuracy and lower cost.

Interactive travel planning has become a popular use case for language models. Agents are deployed to manage evolving preferences and unexpected disruptions over multiple turns. Such settings require models to make complex, profile-conditioned planning decisions. However, existing benchmarks often evaluate feasibility, personalization, or interaction in relatively isolated settings. We therefore introduce Trip+ to measure the ability of agents to plan travel holistically. In Trip+, given traveler profiles and dynamic interactions, agents must generate and revise minute-level itineraries. End-to-end traveler experiences are evaluated via an LLM-based simulator, enabling the assessment of subjective metrics like fatigue. Our scenarios range from simple request resolutions to complex environment-driven replanning. We evaluate 18 LMs and find a consistent gap in experiential quality. Models favor technically feasible but exhausting itineraries that diverge sharply from profiled traveler preferences.

Latent world models can achieve accurate latent prediction yet still differ substantially in downstream planning performance. We argue that a key source of this discrepancy lies in the structure of action-induced latent transitions. We formalize action-identifiability through Bayes inverse risk, characterizing how much uncertainty about an action remains after observing the transition it induces. Model-predicted transitions can become highly self-decodable while encoding a domain-specific action relationship that fails to transfer to real environment transitions. We characterize this mismatch through cross-domain inverse transfer, instantiated as the Action-Consistency Transfer Matrix (ATM), a $2\times2$ inverse-risk matrix over real and predicted transition domains. Across TwoRoom, PushT, and OGBench-Cube, true-transition action-identifiability tracks downstream planning substantially better than standard prediction loss, while the full ATM reveals highly self-decodable yet cross-domain-inconsistent predicted transitions. Controlled interventions on the two domains further produce distinct transition structures and planning outcomes, supporting this decomposition. The same diagnostics also support lightweight model screening, reaching 98.81% pairwise ranking accuracy for candidates separated by more than 5% success.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong empirical gains as self-evolving agents for CUDA kernel generation, driven by feedback-conditioned planning across generations. However, how planning decisions attribute and combine heterogeneous feedback signals remains opaque. Standard end-to-end ablations fail to resolve this question, as iterative planning amplifies early perturbations and conflates feedback effects with trajectory-dependent drift. We introduce \texttt{CUDAnalyst}, a unified analysis layer for controlled, generation-level attribution of planning decisions to feedback components via trajectory freezing and selective feedback injection. \texttt{CUDAnalyst} enables stable generation-level evaluation and principled coalitional-style attribution of feedback effects and interactions. Our results show that explicit planning is beneficial only when feedback is aligned, that effective planning emerges from structured multi-feedback interactions, and that high-level plans from stronger reasoning models can partially transfer to weaker ones. These trends hold across reference backbones, representative workloads, and reference induction regimes, indicating that the identified feedback-to-plan structure is robust within the controlled axes studied.

Current interactive LLM agents rely on goal-conditioned stepwise planning, where environmental understanding is acquired reactively during execution rather than established beforehand. This temporal inversion leads to Delayed Environmental Perception: agents must infer environmental constraints through trial-and-error, resulting in an Epistemic Bottleneck that traps them in inefficient failure cycles. Inspired by human affordance perception and cognitive map theory, we propose the Map-then-Act Paradigm (MAP), a plug-and-play framework that shifts environment understanding before execution. MAP consists of three stages: (1) Global Exploration, acquiring environment-general priors; (2) Task-Specific Mapping, constructing a structured cognitive map; and (3) Knowledge-Augmented Execution, solving tasks grounded on the map. Experiments show consistent gains across benchmarks and LLMs. On ARC-AGI-3, MAP enables frontier models to surpass near-zero baseline performance in 22 of 25 game environments. We further introduce MAP-2K, a dataset of map-then-act trajectories, and show that training on it outperforms expert execution traces, suggesting that understanding environments is more fundamental than imitation.

Teaching language models to use search tools is not only a question of whether they search, but also of whether they issue good queries. This is especially important in open-domain question answering, where broad or copied queries often waste retrieval budget and derail later reasoning. We propose \Ours, a framework that makes query planning explicit through reusable search skills. At each step, the model first selects a skill, then generates a search or answer action conditioned on the selected skill card. The skill inventory itself is not fixed: SearchSkill maintains an evolving SkillBank, expands or refines it from recurrent failure patterns, and reconstructs affected trajectories before supervised training. The resulting two-stage SFT recipe aligns training with the inference-time protocol of skill selection followed by skill-grounded execution. Across open-source and closed-source models, SearchSkill improves exact match on knowledge-intensive QA benchmarks and yields better retrieval behavior, including fewer copied first queries, more atomic hop-focused queries, and more correct answers within a small search budget. These results suggest that explicit skill-conditioned query planning is a lightweight alternative to treating search as an undifferentiated action.

Temporally contrastive representation learning induces a latent structure capable of reducing long-horizon planning to inference in a low-dimensional linear system. However, existing contrastive planning work learns a single latent geometry which cannot distinguish multiple valid behaviors trading task efficiency against risk exposure for the same start-goal query. We introduce MoMo, a preference-conditioned contrastive planner allowing a scalar user preference to continuously modulate plan conservativeness at inference time, without retraining. MoMo learns a joint conditioning of the representation geometry and latent prediction operator via Feature-Wise Linear Modulation and low-rank neural modulation, respectively. We show that our formulation preserves the probability density ratio encoded in the representation space that is required for inference-driven contrastive planning, further retaining its inference-time efficiency. Across six environments, MoMo smoothly adapts plan safety according to user preferences, yielding improved temporal and preferential consistency over state augmentation baselines.

Generative models can produce individual game facets, but whole-game generation remains an orchestration problem: narrative, level structure, encounters, objectives, rewards, and visuals must express shared intent. We present Forking Garden, a branching game generation system that uses narrative archetype as a persistent semantic signal across the generation pipeline. Narrative progression is represented as soft Rise/Fall states; candidate plot nodes are generated before structural constraints assemble archetype-conforming graphs. The same state then conditions encounter composition, objectives, rewards, and runtime difficulty adaptation, while a shared symbolic schema preserves narrative entities and gameplay configurations through content instantiation. Across 10 storylines, generated paths exhibit distinguishable archetypal trajectories, narrative threat predicts damage taken by a threat-blind combat agent, and generate-first-constrain-later yields 2.6 times the entity diversity of a hierarchical baseline. A 16-participant study further suggests that propagated Rise/Fall distinctions can remain meaningful during play, while also supporting narrative understanding and creator-oriented interpretation.

We present the Global Neural World Model (GNWM), a self-stabilizing framework that achieves topological quantization through balanced continuous entropy constraints. Operating as a continuous, action-conditioned Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), the GNWM maps environments onto a discrete 2D grid, enforcing translational equivariance without pixel-level reconstruction. Our results show this architecture prevents manifold drift during autoregressive rollouts by using grid ``snapping'' as a native error-correction mechanism. Furthermore, by training via maximum entropy exploration (random walks), the model learns generalized transition dynamics rather than memorizing specific expert trajectories. We validate the GNWM across passive observation, active agent control, and abstract sequence regimes, demonstrating its capacity to act not just as a spatial physics simulator, but as a causal discovery model capable of organizing continuous, predictable concepts into structured topological maps.

Natural-language instructions rarely specify every detail required for embodied action. An agent asked to ``prepare an apple,'' for example, must still determine whether to wash or cut it, where to place it, and in what order to perform these actions. Such decisions often reflect user-specific preferences that are demonstrated through behavior but never explicitly stated. We study whether embodied agents can infer these latent preferences from a small number of prior demonstrations and apply them when planning in new situations. To support systematic evaluation, we introduce Preference-based Planning (PbP), a benchmark containing 5,000 evaluation groups and 290 preferences organized into three levels: atomic action parameters, strategic interaction and placement policies, and temporal ordering constraints. We further propose Inferring the Unspoken (InTU), a two-stage framework that first verbalizes the preference inferred from multimodal behavioral demonstrations and then generates an action plan conditioned on that explicit representation. Experiments with video-language and language models reveal a substantial preference-acquisition gap: models plan effectively when given the ground-truth preference, but their performance degrades sharply when the same preference must be inferred from behavior. Explicit verbalization consistently improves alignment over direct end-to-end planning, particularly for strong multimodal models, and provides greater robustness when preferences must transfer across visually distinct scenes. These results identify visual-to-semantic preference acquisition, rather than preference-conditioned planning alone, as a central bottleneck in personalized embodied intelligence. They also demonstrate that language can serve as an interpretable and transferable intermediate representation between observed behavior and personalized action.

Safety is a fundamental requirement for autonomous driving, yet existing end-to-end driving models still lack explicit risk-aware learning capacities. Existing rule-based risk models provide interpretable safety priors, yet their absolute risk scores depend on handcrafted functions, coefficients, and thresholds. Learning-based risk representations reduce part of this manual design, but their supervision often relies on occupancy-derived labels or heuristic cost values, which may not capture ego-conditioned planning risk. In this paper, we propose DRiF, a data-driven risk-field framework for safer end-to-end autonomous driving. DRiF learns a shared BEV feature with static map segmentation, dynamic risk prediction, and vehicle planning. For dynamic risk learning, DRiF converts rule-based safety priors into pairwise risk labels, and trains the risk field to preserve relative risk ordering instead of regressing handcrafted absolute scores. Experiments on Bench2Drive show that DRiF achieves competitive overall performance, with consistent improvements in driving score, success rate, and collision-related metrics. These results establish relative risk supervision as an effective way to connect explicit safety structure with end-to-end planning. The data and code will be publicly available.