Planning Methods

Agent harnesses supply planning guidance, organize execution, and check completion. We study how these components affect success, erroneous acceptance, and cost in two Retail experiments and an Airline pilot in $τ^2$-bench. The primary comparison pairs prewritten task-specific plans (Fixed) with shuffled policy text matched in word count (Sham), isolating the contribution of guidance content. Across 265 matched cells, Fixed improves oracle-verified success by 7.17 percentage points (90% task-clustered bootstrap interval, 1.15--13.36 points), with gains concentrated in higher-complexity tasks. A read-only terminal verifier rejects 61% of Retail oracle-invalid episodes while withholding 17% of correct ones, at less than one cent of additional cost per episode. Which component matters more depends on the loss assigned to erroneous acceptance: at low liability the planning gain dominates; at high liability the verifier's avoided false passes dominate---and a standalone verifier captures nearly all the false-pass benefit of the full planning-plus-verification stack at a fraction of its cost.

The economic value of inference depends on how capacity and task information are distributed across stages of AI production. We study these organizational margins using controlled workflow experiments on externally verified software-engineering tasks. In two matched resource panels, direct execution records the same success rate of 59.6 percent at logical-token ceilings of 12,000 and 24,000, while success under information-constrained planning rises from 36.2 to 51.2 percent. The planning disadvantage narrows by 15.0 percentage points (95 percent task-cluster bootstrap interval: 4.2 to 25.8). A strict read-only planning campaign varies whether the planner sees the task issue. At 12,000 tokens, issue access raises success by about 16 percentage points over issue-hidden planning. Compared with direct execution, task-informed planning is about 10 points lower at 12,000 tokens; at 24,000 tokens, it shows a 29.6-point advantage. In the resource panels, direct execution uses substantially less than either ceiling, while the planning workflow's binding rate falls from 46.2 to 0.8 percent and downstream execution accounts for 89.9 percent of the increase in total use. Scale determines the capacity available to a system; workflow and information structure shape the productive value

Robots operating in cluttered environments must often manipulate objects whose locations are only partially observable. A central challenge is deciding whether to acquire another observation or to first manipulate objects that may occlude the target. Conventional task and motion planning (TAMP) approaches typically make this decision using symbolic action costs or expensive geometric planning, neither of which adequately captures how likely an observation is to reveal an occluded target. We introduce Imagine-TAMP, an interleaved planning and execution framework that uses semantic and geometric imagination to compare alternative task-level strategies under partial observability before committing to expensive motion planning. A vision-language model shapes a particle belief over target locations using commonsense relationships between the target and visible objects, while a generative scene model estimates plausible geometry in unobserved regions. Given a target hypothesis and imagined scene, Imagine-TAMP generates multiple symbolic plan skeletons and assigns non-unit costs that approximate both manipulation effort and target visibility from sensing actions, distinguishing a short but poorly informative observation strategy from a longer strategy that first manipulates an occluder to better expose the target. The selected skeleton is then refined into a feasible continuous plan and executed, with new observations updating the belief and triggering replanning when necessary. Experiments show that imagination-guided evaluation improves observation-versus-manipulation decisions: in viewpoint-constrained shelf scenes, non-unit geometric evaluation increases success from 46.0% to 84.0%, while semantic belief shaping further reduces manipulation and replanning. On a real robot, the complete system reduces planning time by 32% relative to a geometry-only ablation.

Floor-plan-based indoor visual localization enables infrastructure-free positioning, but most methods are developed and evaluated in small residential environments unlike the large public buildings of real deployment. We introduce SlugTrails, a floor plan localization benchmark for large indoor spaces under realistic egocentric sensing: $30$ Hz Aria glasses recordings across three campus buildings and six floors ($22089$ m$^2$ of floor plan outline), CAD-derived floor plans with semantic classes and circulation space masks, and trajectories aligned into the floor plan frame using laser-surveyed anchors. One protocol covers three practical ways of gathering geometry under a limited field of view -- a single walking frame, a stationary multi-view sweep, and a walking stream with odometry -- so methods designed for different regimes are compared on the same buildings and ground truth. Evaluating five representative geometric and learned systems under their native sensing configurations, we find that stock checkpoints (official released weights) are near zero on SlugTrails (at most $0.004$ R@1m30$^{\circ}$ on walking single frames), while fine-tuning on SlugTrails improves every trainable family on all three tasks (e.g., F$^3$Loc $0.0 \rightarrow 0.141$ single-frame and $0.03 \rightarrow 0.66$ sequential), with gains compounding as observations accumulate. The same fine-tuned weights also improve cross-dataset generalization on LaMAR with no LaMAR training (sequential R@1m $0.048 \rightarrow 0.143$ for F$^3$Loc and $0.063 \rightarrow 0.127$ for UnLoc), whereas train-from-scratch on SlugTrails alone stays far below fine-tuning from stock weights -- evidence that floor plan localization is currently limited by indoor data rather than by architecture. We release the dataset, protocols, and tools at https://github.com/Head-inthe-Cloud/SlugTrails.

Navigation world models plan by foresight, predicting the future that each candidate action sequence produces and selecting the best, rather than mapping observations to actions directly. Unlike urban settings where a predicted scene is a sufficient proxy, off-road navigation hinges on the robot--terrain interaction, so the prediction must cover not only what the camera will see but what the robot will feel. However, existing scene-focused models do not predict how much the robot will slip, tilt or shake along a planned trajectory. Proprioception captures these dynamics directly and, when used as input, improves the prediction of the physical future. We present Feel-WM, the first off-road navigation world model that conditions on proprioception and predicts what the robot will feel alongside what the camera will see. The physical future takes the form of a future proprioceptive state and a failure risk, both learned from the robot's own experience without human labels. The planner rolls out the physical future alongside the scene and weighs the predicted failure risk against goal similarity in a separable score. Experiments on real off-road data and in simulation demonstrate that Feel-WM outperforms visual-only navigation world models in open-loop planning and closed-loop rough-terrain navigation across wheeled and legged platforms. Deployed on a Husky on mountain trails, Feel-WM plans onboard, predicts rough ground ahead and steers around it, completing courses that an end-to-end policy fails.

Executable environments enable LLM agents to learn from the consequences of their actions. For embodied agents, those consequences extend beyond whether the current task succeeds: completing a delivery can consume the time, energy, or money needed for later work. Learning to plan therefore requires environments that preserve these dependencies and turn them into feedback across a complete trajectory. We introduce DeliveryGym, a 3D environment for evaluating and training agents on continuous courier shifts. It couples multimodal tool interaction with persistent world dynamics and computes trajectory rewards from simulator events, making the costs of an agent's decisions available for reinforcement learning (RL). The environment also adapts future training shifts to the policy's observed weaknesses while keeping evaluation fixed. Across six models and 13 city maps, evaluation exposes a gap between reliably executing assigned deliveries and choosing and sequencing work over a shift. On the unseen-city test set, RL improves Qwen3-VL-4B's net income by 54.3%, showing that learning from complete shifts improves performance under these coupled constraints. Adapting the training environment improves evaluation income by 18% over uniform sampling at 100 updates, indicating that which situations an agent practices also matters. DeliveryGym provides an executable setting for studying how agents learn to coordinate deliveries and preserve resources for later orders within an episode.

Conventional robot planning methods seek collision-free paths to a goal but fail when all paths are blocked. In these cases, the robot must determine which objects to relocate, in what order, and where to place them to clear a path---a problem known as Navigation Among Movable Obstacles (NAMO). Most NAMO planners assume a known environment, while existing approaches for unknown environments typically reason locally about relocations and cannot plan interdependent relocation sequences. We consider NAMO in unknown environments revealed through onboard sensing, where the robot must decide whether a blocked route requires relocation or a feasible path may exist through unexplored space. We propose an online framework that addresses this ambiguity by selecting between navigation and relocation using shortest paths that treat discovered movable objects as obstacles or as removable. Navigation relies on existing motion planners, while relocation uses a sampling-based approach that, unlike existing approaches for unknown environments, searches over \textit{interdependent} relocation sequences and uses an LLM to bias sampling. Numerical experiments demonstrate scalability to cluttered environments requiring interdependent relocations and improved plan quality over existing baselines.

Work zones alter lane geometry through temporary traffic controls and closures that may be absent from on-board maps, challenging autonomous vehicle (AV) perception and planning. Generalization is also limited by scarce public datasets with structured geometric supervision. We present WorkZonePlan, a dataset comprising 149K+ synthetic and 5K+ real-world multimodal samples with 3D annotations for lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectory options. It also provides 76 closed-loop CARLA scenarios replayed under three weather conditions, yielding 228 Bench2Drive-format evaluation routes. We introduce WAVE (Work-zone-focused AV data generation in Virtual and rEal Environments), a semi-automated pipeline for creating the dataset, and BoundaryFormer (BF), a transformer-based model that jointly predicts lane and work zone boundary polynomials and driving trajectories. BF uses slot attention for boundary prediction. Ablations show that a separate trajectory decoder using boundary slot features substantially improves trajectory prediction over a slot-attention-only approach. Building on this finding, BF++ offers Camera and Camera+LiDAR variants with metric ground-plane encoding, typed boundary/trajectory queries, long-range point anchors, image-space curve refinement, and conservative gated LiDAR fusion. On the 211 routes common to all four models at the evaluation freeze, BF++-Camera and BF++-Camera+LiDAR achieve Driving Scores of 63.0 and 64.4, respectively, compared with 59.3 for SimLingo and 26.1 for TransFuser++ (TF++). BF++ is 40 times smaller than SimLingo and more than 10 times smaller than TF++, while achieving higher Driving Scores. These results support jointly predicting lane boundaries, work zone boundaries, and driving trajectories as a promising direction toward safer AV operation in work zones. Code and dataset: https://github.com/Nishad-Sahu/WZPlanner.

Robotic additive manufacturing (AM) extends material-extrusion printing beyond gantry kinematics but makes process planning robot-dependent. A slicer-generated plan that appears favorable in part coordinates can become infeasible or robotically unfavorable on a manipulator because slicer-process decisions and part orientation determine the generated path, while part orientation and workspace placement affect its kinematic realization. Existing AM tools, large language model (LLM)-based decision-support methods, and digital-shadow systems do not provide integrated pre-execution evaluation of these coupled decisions. This paper presents agentic robotic additive manufacturing (A-RAM), an agent-specialist-tool framework that converts user intent and a part file into traceable, execution-ready plans. The LLM interprets manufacturing objectives and constraints, identifies prescribed and searchable planning variables, and encodes this reasoning in a schema-constrained request; a deterministic Planning Agent instantiates the corresponding search workflow, while domain tools compute quantitative evidence for slicing, placement, inverse kinematics, trajectory timing, Joint-6 jerk, and extrusion. The framework is evaluated on a six-axis robotic-arm AM cell through three case studies covering expert-specified planning, goal-only planning, objective-dependent infill screening, and geometry-dependent orientation-placement selection. Across the evaluated candidate sets, selected plans achieve up to 53.5% lower maximum Joint-6 jerk and 48.3% lower mean absolute Joint-6 jerk than the least favorable valid candidates, while objective-specific infill screening yields motion-plan completion times up to 40.1% shorter and extrusion paths up to 12.7% shorter than the corresponding least favorable screened patterns.

Large language models (LLMs) provide a flexible interface for long-horizon robot planning, but generated plans often fail to respect embodiment constraints, recover from planning errors, or reason effectively under partial observability. We present GAVEL, a framework for verifying and repairing long-horizon LLM planning built around an explicit graph world model. The graph represents relevant object-relations, action pre-conditions and effects, and probabilistic beliefs over unobserved object locations. This model can predict the consequences of LLM-generated actions before execution, detect violations, and repair those whose corrections follow directly from the world model. This method also reserves LLM replanning solely for errors requiring semantic reasoning. For multi-task instructions, GAVEL reasons over distributions of possible object locations to reorder remaining subtasks and minimize expected search cost. We evaluate GAVEL on BEHAVIOR-1K across 100 single long-horizon tasks and 500 multi-task instructions. With Qwen3-8B, GAVEL improves single-task success from 41.2% to 91.8% and multi-task success from 19.9% to 92.6%. Distributional belief reasoning also reduces travel distance by approximately 5.4% compared with a static variant. These improvements show that an explicit graph world model harness can substantially improve the reliability and efficiency of long-horizon embodied planning across compact and frontier hosted LLM capabilities.

Conventional motion planning treats collision as a binary constraint, although contact with different objects can have drastically different consequences. A robot may safely brush against a cardboard box while even minor contact with a glass, laptop, or unstable object may be undesirable. Moreover, a direct robot--object collision can move the contacted object and trigger secondary object--object collisions, making the risk of a motion depend on the physical evolution of the scene rather than only on the robot's geometric path. We present CaSCo, a cascade-aware soft-collision motion planning framework in which a vision-language or language model assigns semantic risk to objects and a physics simulator predicts the consequences of candidate robot motions. CaSCo searches for a path that minimizes the total semantic risk of the unique objects displaced either directly by the robot or indirectly through cascaded collisions. Because collisions change the environment, we augment roadmap states with the predicted object arrangement and the set of objects whose risk has already been incurred. We develop an optimal graph-search algorithm with an admissible and consistent cascade-relaxed heuristic and caching and pruning mechanisms for efficient search. Experiments in cluttered manipulation environments evaluate semantic risk, cascade reasoning, planning efficiency, and real-robot operation.

Adaptive learning systems commonly formulate learning path planning as Exercise-Centric (EC) recommendation, where the next step is inferred from item-level interaction logs. Evaluating goal-oriented guidance additionally requires explicit learner goals and curriculum-scale prerequisites: learners with similar exercise records may need different paths toward their targets. We therefore study Knowledge-Centric (KC) personalized learning path planning, where a planner must reason over learner profiles, mastery states, and prerequisite knowledge structures to decide which textbook, unit, and concept should be studied next. To support this setting, we introduce PersonaPath, a benchmark that pairs 2,000 fine-grained learner personas with a hierarchical knowledge graph of 347 textbooks, 1,751 units, and 4,092 concepts across 77 subjects. We evaluate representative LLMs on PersonaPath. Results show that even the strongest LLM reaches only a 29.5% final pass rate in Basic Education, and that the main bottleneck lies in adaptivity, where no model exceeds 44.7% in tailoring paths to individual learners.

Multi-robot task and motion planning (MR-TAMP) requires jointly reasoning about discrete task decisions and continuous collision-free motions of multiple interacting robots. Although asymptotically optimal algorithms have been developed for task and motion planning, extending these guarantees to the multi-robot setting introduces an important challenge: different task transitions may involve different subsets of robots and therefore impose constraints of different dimensions on the composite configuration space. Consequently, an asymptotically optimal planner must not only optimize motion within each task mode, but also ensure sufficient exploration of the different types of transitions connecting them. We characterize this transition structure and establish sufficient conditions for global asymptotic optimality in MR-TAMP, requiring persistent coverage of relevant transitions and asymptotically improving motion planning within connected feasible regions. Based on these conditions, we develop an efficient asymptotically optimal MR-TAMP algorithm that combines evolving individual-robot roadmaps with implicit tensor-product search, avoiding explicit construction of the composite roadmap. The planner further employs conditional transition sampling, lazy collision checking, and mode- and solution-level guidance to improve finite-time planning efficiency while retaining persistent exploration. The resulting framework provides asymptotic optimality guarantees for multi-robot manipulation while efficiently exploiting the structure of individual-robot motion planning.

Bridging the gap between human intent and machine execution remains a challenge in automated planning, where expressing goals in formal languages like PDDL restricts accessibility to non-experts. This paper empirically evaluates whether current Large Language Models (LLMs) can reliably translate natural language testing goals, written in informal language by video game testers, into well-formed PDDL targets suitable for classical planning. We present a carefully designed prompt template, integrating insights from iterative experimentation, aimed at maximizing both accuracy and response coherence from multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. Six contemporary models are systematically assessed on correctness, speed, and error tendencies using real-world, domain-specific benchmarks. All models demonstrate high correctness, exceeding 92%, with Gemini 2.5 Flash achieving the highest accuracy at 96% and the lowest incidence of false positives, while GPT-4.1 leads in response speed. Despite these advances, critical distinctions exist in model performance, and occasional failures arise from language ambiguity and limitations in domain representation. Our analysis underscores both the significant progress and ongoing gaps in enabling LLMs to act as robust bridges between natural language objectives and automated planning pipelines.

Safe motion planning in automated driving requires anticipating evolving traffic risks and deciding when to revise the current planned trajectory. We introduce RiskWorld, a risk-aware world modeling framework for shared occupancy forecasting and selective trajectory replacement. Spatial risk fields and temporal actor context are fused with visual bird's-eye-view features. Flow-guided evolution transports occupancy and scene features, while signed residuals correct occupancy after transport. One forecast is generated per planning step and reused across candidates. Each candidate is compared with a current-state persistence reference, yielding a nonnegative collision-score correction. The trajectory selected by current-world evaluation serves as the planning anchor and is replaced only when additional predicted risk triggers intervention and an alternative satisfies component-wise constraints on predicted risk and trajectory error. Candidate geometries remain unchanged. We evaluate RiskWorld for open-loop planning on nuScenes using camera features, annotation-derived current and historical actor states, and dataset-provided map context. RiskWorld achieves the lowest collision rate at a long evaluation horizon of 3 s, and the second-best average L2 error among various state-of-the-art baselines, while running at 11.5 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 with 90.81 M parameters. Within-setting ablations show that RiskWorld achieves lower collision rates than the current-state rescoring baseline, while forecast reuse enables additional candidates to be evaluated at low marginal computational cost.

Lindsey et al. (2025) report that Claude 3.5 Haiku plans rhymes: features for candidate rhyme words are active on the newline before a line is written, and a suppress-and-inject intervention redirects the line only when applied there (their Figure 13). We test how far this generalizes on seven cells crossing four open models (0.6B to 2.6B parameters) with six open cross-layer transcoders (CLTs), on one consumer GPU, decomposing the claim into position specificity (C1), newline site identity (C2), and a newline-resident plan (C3). This is a stress test rather than a faithful reproduction: attribution graphs are unavailable for these CLTs, so features are found bottom-up from decoder vectors. C1 generalizes, in every cell and in all 247 of 444 prompt-by-inject pairs with a detectable effect, but the effective position is the final prompt token, adjacent to emission, and only two cells reach behaviorally meaningful probabilities. C2 and C3 are not recovered by any probe: a census of every active feature finds no rhyme-anticipating enrichment at the newline, and steering the newline while the model composes the whole line, over 36 runs and 8,640 sampled lines, shows why. That intervention is strong but one token long, making the injected word the first word of the composed line in 703 of 720 samples and leaving the rhyme six words later untouched. A final test drops the transcoder entirely: patching the newline's whole residual, at every layer, from a minimal-pair poem whose third line ends on a different rhyme moves the rhyme in 11 of 1,260 composed lines against 4 at baseline, with a design resolving 1.4%. We read this as a boundary condition rather than a refutation: at this scale and with these transcoders, the causal site is emission-adjacent. We reproduce Figure 13's shape, not its mechanism. Code and data are public (code: github.com/PCfVW/poetry-planning-site).

Remote sensing recognition is often constrained by scarce observations of rare targets and costly annotations, making realistic synthetic augmentation particularly valuable for few-shot and long-tailed scenarios. Object insertion provides an efficient way to increase target diversity while preserving authentic background scenes, but realistic insertion in overhead imagery requires the generated target to adapt coherently to its surrounding environment. To this end, we propose PDA++, a unified environment-aware object insertion framework organized as Plan, Decouple, and Assimilate. Planning determines scene-compatible poses through an affordance field that combines geometric clearance with structure- and scale-aware cues. Decoupling introduces a pose-conditioned background that provides precise spatial guidance together with target-scene context, allowing the reference object to preserve its identity while adapting to the target observation. This construction also naturally provides pixel-level masks for segmentation augmentation. Assimilation further improves local coherence by aligning multi-scale texture distributions through optimal transport. On the optical benchmark, PDA++ achieves a whole-image FID of 6.28 and improves average few-shot recognition mAP50 by 17.69 points, corresponding to a 28.8% relative gain over the real-data baseline. On SAR imagery, it improves ship detection by 4.10 mAP50 points and remains effective under cross-dataset transfer and amorphous-target insertion. Code is available at https://github.com/lisheyu972/PDA_PLUS.

Many learned sequential decision systems map the current state directly to an action. That shortcut becomes brittle when candidate actions are numerous, geometrically structured, and rebuilt with the state. One-to-many mobile charging makes this setting concrete: with N=250 sensors, the initial state induces about 1,125 candidate charging-stop actions; each chosen stop simultaneously serves its in-range sensors, and the action universe changes as sensors die. LP-BTS is a learning-guided planning architecture: a graph proposal policy concentrates a small candidate support, a learned value critic evaluates leaves, and edge-budgeted PUCT compares short simulated futures before committing an action. Because the policy scores this set without a fixed output head, a single frozen checkpoint covers every evaluated setting, spanning action universes from 736 to 2,813 stops. Matched ablations reveal complementary effects: uniform sampling costs 8.8 survival percentage points, while, with targeted support fixed, PUCT jointly retains 1.4 points (about 3.5 of 250 sensors) and direct policy selection travels 23% farther. On a prospectively specified, sealed 30-scenario confirmatory bank evaluated once, LP-BTS attains the highest observed survival (0.4545) and alive-AUC (0.8031). Its estimated survival advantage over the strongest domain-engineered comparator is +0.0066 (95% CI [-0.0037, +0.0184]), an unresolved difference, while it exceeds a deadline heuristic and two source-derived direct-policy reconstructions on every paired scenario. Both learned rows are trained, source-derived reconstructions of variants reported by Gong et al. In this setting, the results provide controlled evidence about learning-guided planning in a large, dynamic action space.

Assembly Sequence Planning (ASP) remains a challenging problem due to its combinatorial nature, making exhaustive planning approaches impractical for complex industrial assemblies. Furthermore, many CAD models lack reliable semantic contact information or require extensive manual preprocessing, limiting the applicability of existing methods. This paper presents a hybrid ASP framework combining learning-based relation extraction with geometric-symbolic reasoning to generate feasible robotic disassembly sequences from imperfect CAD data. A neural network predicts semantic geometric relations from point clouds, while human-in-the-loop verification enables correction of uncertain predictions and planning failures. Extracted relations are transformed into a symbolic assembly graph, enabling a geometric-symbolic planner to efficiently compute locally valid sets of robotic manipulation primitives. A visibility-based ray-casting strategy guides the search for feasible disassembly directions without requiring an exhaustive combinatorial search, while the local solution space enables efficient sequence optimization. The framework is evaluated on an introduced assembly dataset and on the ASAP test dataset. On the ASAP test dataset, the proposed planner achieves an 85.83% planning success rate while reducing the median planning time by more than one order of magnitude across all assembly sizes and by more than a factor of 50 for assemblies with more than 30 components compared to the baseline. The results demonstrate that the proposed hybrid framework enables efficient robotic assembly sequence planning from imperfect CAD data while substantially reducing planning time. By combining learning-based feature segmentation, human-in-the-loop verification, and geometric-symbolic reasoning, the framework provides a practical foundation for scalable and adaptable robotic assembly and disassembly planning.

Recent advancements in large language models have significantly enhanced the capabilities of agents in modeling long-term conversations. Despite these successes, existing approaches typically adopt a static heuristic paradigm, where information is passively archived without adaptive memory valuation. Consequently, these methods fail to self-evolve or align their memory management with evolving user needs. To address this, we propose ICML (InteraCtive Memory Learning), a multi-agent framework that transforms the memory mechanism from a passive archive into a learnable, interactive memory policy. Specifically, we first employ a session synthesis pipeline to generate expert data, facilitating rapid test-time adaptation in unseen scenarios. Building on this, ICML utilizes an online reinforcement learning mechanism where a Planner agent selectively encodes high-value information and a Trigger agent dynamically retrieves it to optimize response quality, whereby the two agents co-evolve through continuous interaction feedback. Crucially, both agents are synchronized through a delayed reward mechanism that propagates future feedback back to earlier storage decisions, ensuring memory policies are precisely aligned with user expectations. Experimental results demonstrate that ICML significantly outperforms strong baselines, exhibiting the unique capability to continuously improve response quality as interactions accumulate.

In partially observable settings, agents must act without full knowledge of the world state and rely on uncertain state-estimation pipelines. Obtaining grounded and verifiable symbolic plans under such uncertainty remains a key challenge. Recent work has integrated Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge perception and symbolic reasoning, following two main paradigms. The first, VLM-as-planner, maps images directly to action sequences, and the second, VLM-as-grounder, grounds observations into symbolic predicates used as the initial state by off-the-shelf planners. Both approaches ignore uncertainty in the planning process, compromising robustness. We introduce a third paradigm, VLM-as-probabilistic-grounder, a novel approach that captures the uncertainty of VLM predicate groundings as a probability distribution over symbolic states. This enables planning in belief space and producing robust plans under uncertainty. Experiments in simulated household robot settings show improved robustness and task success over deterministic grounding, underscoring how our approach leverages foundation models for reliable planning under uncertainty.

Safe local planning requires forecasting surrounding-agent motion and evaluating candidate-specific risks, since identical agent motion can pose different risks to different ego trajectories. We present CorrRisk-WM, a planning-oriented partial world model coupling environment evolution with supervised intrusion and near-miss prediction over bounded candidate-trajectory corridors. A latent environment model recursively predicts agent states and updates agent-agent and agent-map interactions. Each candidate queries the evolving environment through footprint- aware geometry and learned agent-corridor representations. A lightweight recurrent risk module uses temporal context to estimate per-slice hazards; survival aggregation yields first-entry and horizon-level event probabilities. On 29,176 scenarios from 100 Waymo validation shards, CorrRisk-WM achieves intrusion average precision (AP) of 0.8567 and 1-m near-miss first-entry AP of 0.8671. In baseline comparisons, it attains the highest near-miss AP at all three distance thresholds and the lowest observed open-loop collision rate (4.88%), with route progress of 15.35 m. Across three seeds, removing dynamic environment modeling or candidate-conditioned geometric interaction reduces mean intrusion AP from 0.8590 to 0.7624 and 0.7252, respectively. These results support coupling environment evolution with candidate-conditioned geometric reasoning for risk prediction and safety-oriented candidate selection.

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a safety strategy where the reasoning of a large language model "actor" is inspected by a "monitor" (often another language model) for signs of unsafe planning, deception, or misalignment. We find that planting harmful but benign-sounding reasoning in the actor's context can steer it to perform adversarial actions while evading monitors, an attack we term "plan injection". We initially discover this attack in the multiple-choice question-answering monitorability setting proposed by Lanham et al. (2023), using the investigator-agent elicitation framework of Li et al. (2025). We generalize the attack and show that the discovered behavior scales to harder tasks (achieving 25-33% monitor evasion rates across different monitorability benchmarks) and larger models such as DeepSeek-R1. Across the settings we study, actor models not only follow injected plans but also paraphrase them as their own reasoning, without explicit attribution to the injections. Finally, we find cases where extra monitor resources cause harm - giving the monitor access to the injected plan drops detection by as much as 50% in the Bio-Math task and in a case study on monitor reasoning budget, we find transcripts where additional thinking tokens are spent rationalizing the injected plan rather than flagging it.

Planning in complex environments requires task specifications grounded in representations that capture objects, relations, and affordances; scene graphs meet this need, but their size in large environments hinders efficient planning. While task-aware pruning and hierarchical abstractions have been explored, a general, task-centric formalization of what constitutes a sufficient scene graph for planning remains open. This paper provides such a formalization by modeling planning over scene graphs within an information-spaces framework through the definition of scene graph transition systems and relevant action semantics for navigation and manipulation. We then introduce derived scene graphs via information mappings that merge and prune nodes and induce quotient transition systems augmented with motion primitives to capture higher-level actions over merged graph nodes. Sufficiency is characterized by two conditions: (i) the information mapping yields a deterministic quotient, and (ii) the task is well-posed over derived traces, ensuring plans found on the derived model are feasible on the maximal system. We illustrate the framework using a task over an example environment, showing both sufficient and insufficient reduced scene graphs.

As robotic systems grow more general, legal norms are needed to integrate them into society. This paper extends the isomorphism problem of aligning legal source texts with their encodings, and measures two key challenges to robot normative control: (1) the grounding isomorphism gap, where perception error grounds false atoms for legal reasoning, and (2) the ontological isomorphism gap, where one legal conclusion admits many faithful translations into planning constraints. The paper introduces a legal planning stack that employs Defeasible Deontic Logic (DDL) to constrain a motion planner. The stack leverages learned world models to plan and to provide legal context, enabling ex ante governance that intervenes before an illegal action is executed. It was deployed on a simulated robot arm pushing a cube across a 3x3 grid. The findings were (1) the legislated agent abided substantially more often than the non-legislated one, and modeling perception uncertainty lifted abidance even further, (2) the legal reasoning ran efficiently at runtime and its verdicts were auditable, and (3) the stack adapted to exogenous signals and endogenous rule changes. Both gaps were measured: (4) world model and probe error corrupted the factual input for the DDL reasoner, and (5) a single law admitted several faithful metric interpretations yielding drastically different abidance. Thus, ex ante legislation functions as intended, and closing these gaps with a standardized mapping from the law to runtime constraints and improved fact grounding from perception will yield robust laws that align robot behavior with society's norms. Project page: https://dylanwaldner-cail.github.io/Legislated-Planner/.

Joint motion forecasts pair each autonomous-vehicle (AV) future with surrounding traffic, but actor-level metrics do not show whether that structure matters to a planner. We study this question with a marginal-preserving product control that removes AV-traffic pairing among the learned modes while retaining the fixed constant-velocity pair and holding trajectories, actor-level marginals before planner conditioning, candidates, the cost terms and weights, and fallback fixed. The intervention also changes candidate-conditioned concentration. Across twelve runs on 1,400 held-out Argoverse 2 scenarios, the intervention changes 3.0% of route-level offline selections at $τ=4$ m. Control-minus-joint recorded-trajectory regret is $-0.026$ and $-0.118$ at the two training sizes; crossed and seed-$t$ intervals span zero. At $τ=1$ m, relative costs change in 87.9% of route evaluations and route-level offline selections in 8.1%. Before concentration matching, descriptive outcome estimates favor the control. Most of this gap disappears along an approximate concentration-matching path; the remaining contrasts are $+0.112$ and $-0.047$, and both crossed intervals span zero. Actor-level forecast metrics remain identical. Pairing-strength and temperature sweeps show that the decision contrast grows with pairing removal and sharper conditioning. The intervention changes planner decisions even though actor-level metrics remain unchanged. The matching analysis, however, cannot separate any recorded-outcome effect of learned-mode AV-traffic pairing from the accompanying change in conditioned concentration.

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in synthesizing high-fidelity, photorealistic video content. However, they fundamentally lack an intrinsic understanding of physical laws and frequently produce visually appealing but causally illogical sequences characterized by structural hallucinations and physically implausible dynamics. Injecting physical awareness via training-free test-time optimization is a promising alternative, yet existing methods rely on global gradient updates and rigid scheduling heuristics that inadvertently corrupt passive backgrounds and fail to model complex dynamic state changes. To address this, we propose PhysPlan, a novel training-free guidance framework that shifts the paradigm from stochastic visual interpolation to agentic physics simulation. First, a VLM operates as an iterative cognitive simulator, decomposing multimodal inputs into a Chain-of-Visual-Thought to create a multimodal representation of kinematic trajectories and 3D depth geometries. Second, these signals drives an object-centric test-time optimization. Unlike prior training-free methods that rely on global gradients and rigid scheduling heuristics, PhysPlan introduces Object-Centric Gradient Routing to isolate kinematic modifications and completely lock the passive environment. Furthermore, our Kinetic Intensity Profiling dynamically parameterizes framework hyperparameters to accommodate the varying severity of physical deformations. Extensive evaluations on the PhyGenBench and Physics-IQ benchmarks demonstrate that PhysPlan significantly outperforms both foundational and controllable VDM baselines, offering a promising approach for improving the physical understanding of video generation.

Domain practitioners understand their business constraints but may lack operations-research expertise or dedicated support. LLM-based optimization agents translate natural-language requirements into models or solver programs that established optimization tools can execute. This progress makes optimization more accessible, but real-world operations are dynamic: changing demand, resources, and priorities require updates to data, constraints, and objectives. Methods centered on isolated requests offer limited support for rapid adaptation that preserves earlier decisions and reuses useful search results. We introduce MAPLE (Memory-Augmented Planning with Language and Evolution), an agent for maintaining optimization problems through successive natural-language requests. MAPLE combines language-based problem construction with mathematical programming and evolutionary search. It retains the optimization program, accepted plans, earlier updates, and candidate solutions for subsequent requests. We introduce NLDO, a benchmark of 15 trajectories and 180 updates spanning selection, scheduling, rostering, routing, and cloud-resource placement. In the main evaluation, MAPLE completes all trajectories and achieves online scalar quality of 0.951 and a Pareto hypervolume ratio of 0.875. Controlled comparisons further show that maintaining executable state improves update validity and can preserve useful search information across substantial revisions.

Mainstream robotic policies often adopt a Markovian formulation, but many complex real-world manipulation tasks are inherently non-Markovian, requiring long-horizon memory beyond the current observation. Existing memory mechanisms often rely on language summaries, growing visual windows, or their combinations, and may therefore lose fine-grained visual evidence or face a trade-off between history coverage and execution efficiency. We introduce MaP-WAM, a Memory-as-Plans framework that decomposes memory-dependent world-action modeling into memory-grounded planning and plan-conditioned execution, and uses long-term multimodal episodic context as planning-time evidence rather than repeatedly conditioning the executor on the full history. MaP-WAM represents memory as completed segment records containing language instructions and sparse visual context, and converts this episodic memory into compact plans comprising the next segment-level language plan and corresponding visual guidance. A World-Action-Progress (WAP) model executes each plan over an unknown duration by jointly predicting action chunks and corresponding execution progress at inference time, calibrating predicted progress through plan-observation alignment for adaptive segment transitions and closed-loop context updates. MaP-WAM keeps the executor context length fixed, while structured attention further enables key-value caching in both planning and execution. MaP-WAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on RMBench with an 83.3% success rate and attains 78.0% success on real-robot tasks, while maintaining approximately constant executor inference latency as task history grows.

Planning trajectories for robot manipulators under kinematic equality constraints restricts feasible motions to a measure-zero submanifold of the configuration space, requiring special algorithmic treatment. A promising strategy is parametrizing the set of feasible configurations using analytic inverse kinematics (IK). Bespoke analytic IK functions can be written to be differentiable, a necessary property for gradient-based trajectory optimization. But the vast majority of IK functions are computed by automated meta-solvers like IKFast, and are difficult to modify for differentiability. We present a new approach for computing gradients of analytic IK parameterizations: we leverage the inverse function theorem to recover the desired gradients from the ordinary forward kinematic Jacobian. Furthermore, we present a least-squares domain extension and an optimization-amenable description of the reachability constraint, which preserves gradient signal outside the reachable workspace. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through numerical experiments and downstream tasks, including a hardware demonstration of an RB-Y1 picking up a box and placing it on a table. Project website: https://cohnt.github.io/inverse-function-theorem-parameterization/

Human-to-humanoid retargeting has largely been studied on legged platforms, while comparatively few wheeled-humanoid systems support coupled locomotion and manipulation from general human motion. Building on GMR's configurable general-motion retargeting and BeyondMimic's physically simulated R1 Pro learning framework, we present a reproducible pipeline that converts multi-dataset SMPLX motion into executable loco-manipulation behavior for the Galaxea R1 Pro wheeled humanoid. The robot has a planar three-wheel base, a serial torso, and two arms but no leg joints, so human lower-body motion must be redistributed across base motion and torso posture without sacrificing manipulation-relevant arm geometry. Our pipeline combines canonical body-shape preprocessing, planar-base normalization, morphology-aware differential inverse kinematics, shoulder-rooted hierarchical arm retargeting, and continuous torso substitution for bending and squatting. A reference-twist-driven planning layer then decodes planar base motion into continuous three-wheel steering and rolling commands subject to hysteresis, kinematic continuity, acceleration, and actuator-rate limits. Finally, a 21-dimensional BaseDecode policy is trained in Isaac Lab with directional joint-limit scaling, focused upper-body tracking, and a staged wheel-contact reward. The resulting system provides a complete bridge from human motion data to physically trackable wheeled-humanoid loco-manipulation rather than a visualization-only retargeter; quantitative policy comparisons remain scheduled for a later revision.

Large language model agents produce fluent action sequences across a wide range of tasks, yet they fail in characteristic ways once the environment becomes partially observable. Ambiguous feedback pushes them into premature commitments. A single informative observation can collapse their uncertainty onto the wrong hypothesis. Policies drift as the history grows. We trace these symptoms to a common structural cause. An LLM agent, as commonly deployed, is a history-conditioned policy with no explicit belief over hidden state. We propose an architectural fix. The Belief-State Engine (BSE) is an inference module placed outside the LLM. It maintains a Bayesian posterior over the latent states of a given POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process) model, and at each decision step it exposes only that posterior to the LLM. The raw action-observation log is not shown. We set out a minimal four-axiom specification of what a belief-consistent internal state must satisfy, and prove that the LLM paired with the BSE is a sound Markov policy on the belief MDP induced by the underlying POMDP. It therefore inherits the Bellman optimality guarantees of classical POMDP theory, provided the LLM is never exposed to the raw history. We evaluate the architecture on the Tiger POMDP and a red-team attack-graph task, against six baselines: a reactive LLM, Chain-of-Thought, ReAct, a natural-language belief tracker, QMDP, and POMCP. Across both domains, the BSE-augmented agent improves task return, belief calibration, and decision consistency. Ten targeted ablations isolate the contribution of each architectural choice confirms that the effect is not specific to any one model. Code, environment specifications, prompt templates, and seed logs accompany this paper.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for translating Natural Language (NL) planning descriptions into PDDL problem instances. However, standard evaluation criteria such as syntactic validity or planner success can substantially overestimate faithfulness to the described task: a generated problem may be parseable and solvable while misrepresenting the intended initial state, goal, object structure, or optimization target. This paper studies an end-to-end NL-to-PDDL pipeline that combines LLM generation, checks in terms of PDDL parsing, planning and validation, a domain-conformance checker, an LLM critic, and iterative repair. Fine-grained repair feedback is constructed from the domain description, the generated problem, the natural language problem description, and operational diagnostics. Reference-based comparisons against curated benchmark PDDL problem descriptions are used for post-hoc benchmark analysis, and these offline checks include renaming-invariant structural matching and semantic equivalence, where domain support is available. Across Planetarium, AutoPlanBench, and curated PDDL2.1 problems, results show that operational success and benchmark-reference reconstruction can diverge substantially. Results also show that structured repair can be useful, and that PDDL2.1 remains challenging for reference reconstruction, even when operational success improves.

We present the PccDiffuser, a conditional diffusion framework for continuum robots that learns a multimodal distribution over complete configuration-space paths and samples multiple candidate solutions in parallel, which are subsequently converted into an executable trajectory by time allocation considering actuator constraints. Under the piecewise constant-curvature model, we use exponential co-ordinates to describe the robot kinematics, and use graph neural network to encode a variable number of environment obstacles. Analytical differential kinematics is incorporated in the denoising process to improve terminal accuracy and whole-body clearance. On a mixed test set comprising workspace with zero to four obstacles, PccDiffuser achieved a success rate of 91%. Compared with existing sampling- and optimisation-based benchmarks, it delivered both a higher success rate and greater computational efficiency, with the latter advantage becoming more substantial when sampling more candidate solutions. Experiments on a three-section tendon-driven continuum robot further demonstrate consecutive planning, multi-solution planning, and whole-body obstacle avoidance.

Ensuring the safety of autonomous driving is a critical challenge. Scenario-based testing is a systematic process used to validate Autonomous Driving Systems (ADSs), but it remains a fragmented modular pipeline in which scenario generation, retrieval, modification, ADS execution, and results analysis are performed by separate tools with little interaction. Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise across ADS sub-systems such as perception, planning, and control. However, no prior work covers the whole scenario-based testing pipeline for ADSs with a unified LLM-agent framework. We present PlannerForge, an LLM-agent framework that extends all scenario-based testing stages (from Scenario Generation to ADS Assessment) and adds two further LLM-enhanced stages: ADS Enhancement and ADS Benchmarking. We evaluate PlannerForge with 10 off-the-shelf LLMs across all tasks (Generation, Selection, Modification, Module Routing, Planner Testing, and Enhancement) under 5 prompt conditions. Best-per-task scores range from 0.88 to 1.00, and open-source 20-35B backends match commercial APIs on most tasks. Open-source models such as Qwen3.6:35B match commercial APIs on three of the five tasks. Chaining the modules end-to-end retains 83% / 78% of seed queries (commercial / open). It outperforms Scenario Factory 2.0 (Finkeldei et al., 2025) on natural-language generation (193 vs. 144 executable of 200) and realises 92-96% of requested city, road and vehicle attributes. It outperforms BM25 (Robertson and Zaragoza, 2009) at rank 1 selection (92.0% vs. 67.5%) and From-Words-to-Collisions (Gao et al., 2025) on physically valid edits (>=94% vs. 31%). At N=400, cost-tuning lifts planner success from 50.4% to 70.2% and cuts collisions from 19.0% to 8.4%, without domain-specific fine-tuning.

Robotic construction offers the potential to use materials more efficiently and create complex geometries, but current methods rely on rigid, high-precision plans that cannot accommodate the tolerances, inaccuracies, and unexpected changes inherent in physical fabrication. In this work, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that forgoes predefined plans entirely, instead generating construction sequences adaptively as the structure is built. Our method operates on graph-structured state representations and a mixed (parameterized) action space, requiring both discrete block selection and continuous placement parameters. Because the stability simulation of a structure is computationally heavy, we develop an efficient exploration strategy by incorporating unilateral edges into graph neural networks, extending soft actor-critic (SAC) to this hybrid setting. We evaluate our algorithm, HSAC, against the prior method hybrid-PPO (HPPO), demonstrating significantly higher asymptotic performance and good sample efficiency. We also demonstrate HSAC's robustness to hyperparameter choices and its exploration capability, handling up to 10 discrete actions without performance degradation. Finally, we validate our approach on a physical two-robot setup, successfully building a spanning arch with 3D-printed blocks in closed-loop execution, confirming that policies trained in simulation transfer to real hardware.

Embodied planning increasingly relies on vision-language models (VLMs) to translate instructions and visual observations into executable action sequences. However, fluent plans are not always executable. A VLM may refer to objects that are not visually observed, select actions whose required affordances are unavailable, or violate syntax and action constraints. We introduce CLAMP, a multimodal constraint-grounding framework that turns scene evidence into decoding-time constraints for a frozen VLM planner. CLAMP uses the initial observation to restrict object references to those supported by the scene, while a provided symbolic action model specifies state transitions and goals. During decoding, hard masks eliminate invalid next-token candidates, while a Hidden Markov Model (HMM)-based world-state lookahead module reweights the probabilities of the remaining feasible candidates based on action preconditions and goal reachability. This allows the planner to retain the VLM's language prior while preventing visually unsupported, unsafe, or infeasible candidates from entering the plan. For unseen tasks and environments, CLAMP adapts the HMM at test time using label-free continuations sampled from the frozen VLM. Experiments on VLABench, SafeAgentBench, and TaPA show that scene-grounded constraints improve object grounding and safety, while most remaining failures stem from perception errors or misaligned constraint specifications.

Timed Partial Orders (TPOs), originally proposed for workflows, provide an interpretable framework for robot task specification with planning algorithms based on mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). However, TPOs are limited in expressivity, capturing only partial-order events with simple timing constraints. In this paper, we introduce Conditional TPOs (cTPOs), which extend TPOs with richer relative-timing constraints and conditional event activations based on environmental conditions. We show that planning for cTPOs also reduces to an MILP problem; however, the added expressivity results in significantly larger MILPs that can become computationally intractable. To address this challenge, we propose a decomposition algorithm that partitions a cTPO into smaller sub-TPOs, yielding a sequence of smaller MILP problems. We prove that this decomposition is complete and preserves plan optimality while improving the interpretability of complex tasks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of cTPOs as a task specification framework and the efficiency of our decomposition approach, achieving up to four orders of magnitude speedup over the monolithic MILP.

Scheduling activities in business processes can improve efficiency (e.g., reduce makespan), but is challenging because the exact sequence of activities required to complete a case is often uncertain due to decisions based on data that emerges during execution. Nevertheless, probabilistic information regarding such decisions can often be estimated or derived from historical execution logs, and can help anticipate which execution paths are likely to lead to successful completion. Planning with particular execution paths affects feasibility, i.e., the probability of successful completion, and the expected number of superfluous activities that are planned but never executed. We frame the problem as a chance-constrained optimization problem and present two formulations: A decomposed approach with two stages, a planning stage that minimizes the expected number of superfluous activities subject to a feasibility constraint, and a scheduling stage that minimizes the makespan over the planned activities; and an integrated approach that combines planning and scheduling into a single formulation. Evaluation on two real-world and one synthetic dataset shows that the integrated approach yields superior makespans but is intractable at scale, while the decomposed approach scales to large settings.

We present an alternative characterization of the occupancy measure of reinforcement learning, obtained by embedding the planning criterion into the dynamics through a resetting planning process. Its stationary measure, which we term visitation measure, is the object on which the information geometry of decision making is most naturally expressed. The achievable visitation measures form a dually flat statistical manifold whose two affine charts are the visitation probabilities and the log-policies, dual under the conditional entropy. This structure makes planning-as-inference generalize from linear rewards to nonlinear functionals of the visitation, each iterate solved by one natural-gradient step, and gives the temporal-difference error the interpretation of a marginal-utility estimate. We develop the geometry and its consequences for reinforcement learning and theoretical neuroscience.

While HTN planning has received significant attention in recent years, support for numerical reasoning remains very limited. In this paper, we investigate numerical Totally-Ordered HTN (TOHTN) planning and show how standard SAT-based encodings can be naturally extended with SMT to handle numeric fluents. In addition, we introduce a benchmark suite for numerical TOHTN planning, providing a first common basis for evaluation in this setting. Experimental results show that this simple encoding already constitutes a competitive baseline. This work opens the way to more expressive approaches to HTN planning.

Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is a powerful planning formalism based on task decomposition. Although most of the literature studied plan generation, comparatively less attention has been paid to post-plan optimization. In particular, plan deordering has been extensively studied in classical planning but remains under-researched in the HTN setting. Plan deordering removes unnecessary ordering constraints between actions in a plan whilst keeping the plan valid. In this paper, we adapt two established plan deordering techniques from classical planning by extending the techniques to account for hierarchical decomposition constraints. We evaluate our proposed approaches on the IPC 2023 Partial-Order HTN benchmarks and we compare them against Optiplan, an HTN planner that generates partially ordered plans directly. Our results show a substantial reduction in number of ordering constraints in both our implementations. Although we also observe a reduction in critical path length, the improvements are less pronounced.

A model that inherits one-line memories may pull one archived source record before acting; a directive in the store can steer that pull: a pointer, a criterion or both. Across sixteen registered studies (179,352 attempts) we measured where the request goes under each form; every result is descriptive, with registered intervals, no mechanism claim. A length-matched criterion exceeded a bare id on six direct-provider models (D) and failed its registered superiority rule on a nine-model OpenRouter panel (E). On generated worlds (K2-K5): the two registered signatures held on Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, Fable 5 followed the same sign, Haiku 4.5 reversed, and Sonnet 5, the GPT-5.6 endpoints and GPT-6 Astra lay near zero (K2). With a defensive adapter at five gains, the 70B rule for a gain-dependent change of the composite - criterion contrast was not met (K3 and K4); under the 8B attenuation rule (0.95 intervals: slope below zero; change beyond the margin), the 8B change of -17.5 [-26.7, -8.1] did not meet it on 36 families (K4) and at registered power on 337 families -16.6 [-19.4, -13.8] did (realised one-sided error at the margin 1.8 to 3.2% per corner of a finite grid, nominal 2.5%, not a uniform-error guarantee; K4's status stands; K5, first ladder), while a second SecAlign++ adapter under the imposed Meta-SecAlign template did not (-11.8 [-14.3, -9.3]; K5, second ladder); no NOT-MET is a statement that the contrast was unchanged; their difference (+4.7 [+2.3, +7.2]) describes two fixed execution paths, licenses no superiority, equivalence or 'significant difference' claim; nothing follows from the statuses differing (K5). Intervals describe family-reweighting stability conditional on the execution, not reproducibility across engine executions; audit replays were neither substituted for nor averaged into outcomes; no missingness gate fired and directional completions changed no status.

Planning is a central capability that enables agents to decompose complex long-horizon tasks into manageable steps. Test-time search and training-based methods improve planning but incur high inference costs or require expensive training data. Self-evolving memory instead accumulates reusable experience from agent interaction outcomes into an external memory bank, so planning capability keeps improving at inference time without parameter updates. However, existing self-evolving memory methods share an inherent credit assignment problem: they rely on final task outcomes as feedback, but such outcomes conflate plan quality with execution errors and environmental factors, so the accumulated planning experience is often biased and noisy. To address this problem, we propose Credit-Aware Hierarchical Memory Evolution (CHIME), a self-evolving memory framework that maintains a separate planning bank and execution bank and follows an attribute-before-memorize principle: CHIME first attributes each task outcome to the plan, the execution, both, or neither, and then updates only the corresponding memory bank. Extensive experiments on four long-horizon agent benchmarks show that CHIME consistently outperforms state-of-the-art training-based and self-evolving memory baselines. Further analyses reveal several interesting findings. For example, CHIME accumulates effective memory with far fewer items. In addition, the learned memory values faithfully reflect downstream utility: high-quality planning memories are more valuable than execution memories. Finally, the accumulated memory effectively transfers across backbone models. Code will be released at https://github.com/ATH-MaaS/Marco-DeepResearch.

We present SG-AMP, integrating robust depth completion with input-conditioned uncertainty, persistent panoptic mapping, plant scene-graph reasoning, and semantics-aware active view-motion planning. Beyond inspecting uncertain observed regions, the scene graph explicitly hypothesizes unobserved pepper--peduncle attachments and directs close-range sensing toward them. Candidate views are selected according to expected information gain, while class-dependent motion costs distinguish protected peppers, peduncles, and stems from conditionally traversable foliage. On pepper data, the perception network achieves $55.27\%$ semantic mIoU, $38.67\%$ PQ, and $40.62\,\mathrm{mm}$ depth RMSE, while input-conditioned uncertainty improves NYUv2 NLL from $-1.6518$ to $-1.6925$ and AUSE from $0.0102$ to $0.0087$.

Online planning under uncertainty remains a fundamental challenge for robotic systems operating in partially observable environments with high-dimensional state spaces. While sampling-based POMDP solvers enable approximate decision-making in large or continuous domains, their performance degrades as belief dimensionality increases due to the high variance inherent in Monte Carlo-based estimation. In this work, we extend the Rao-Blackwellized online POMDP (RB-POMDP) framework to improve its generalizability in high-dimensional settings through hybrid continuous-discrete belief representations. By analytically propagating uncertainty associated with marginalized state components during tree-based planning, the proposed approach reduces sampling-induced variance in value estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in a robotic search-and-rescue task by integrating it with FastSLAM 2.0. Experimental results show that the proposed planner achieves higher cumulative rewards using significantly fewer particles and planning simulations than purely sampling-based methods under equivalent computational budgets. These results suggest that structured high-dimensional robotic problems admitting tractable sufficient statistics can be effectively leveraged within the RB-POMDP framework for computationally feasible online decision-making.

Robotic systems are deeply embedded in both industry and everyday life, where they are expected to act with speed, precision, and reliability. Classical control and planning methods have long delivered strong guarantees, but often at the cost of computational efficiency and adaptability. More recently, learning-based approaches have shown promise in overcoming these limitations, enabling agents to leverage experience to accelerate decision-making and address previously intractable problems. In this work, we bridge these two approaches through a neuro-symbolic perspective on nonlinear motion planning. Inspired by the Thinking Fast and Slow paradigm, we introduce a dual-process architecture that combines the strengths of robust reasoning and learning. Our framework integrates state-of-the-art symbolic solvers as a System-2'' component with experience-driven System-1'' modules. A metacognitive controller dynamically orchestrates their interaction, selecting when to rely on fast intuition versus slower, more precise reasoning. By evaluating the framework across diverse nonlinear benchmark environments, we demonstrate that this architecture yields consistent gains in planning efficiency, accuracy, and generalization, while promoting reuse across tasks. The results suggest that tightly coupling learning with structured reasoning offers a scalable path toward more capable and adaptive robotic systems.

Planners on graphs of convex sets return trajectories that are collision-free by construction, provided the convex regions are collision-free. The region generator only promises that property probabilistically, and no planner in the family verifies it. We report the first measurement of what the gap costs. On a scaled 14-DOF bimanual library, $3.2\%$ of interface samples are in collision, and a search-based GCS planner (\gcsstar) turns that volume error into a $62\%$ answer error: $18$ of $29$ pick-and-place queries return trajectories that drive the arms through the shelves, up to $91$,mm deep, reported as successes. Repairing the library does not work; a ten times stricter acceptance contract, sums-of-squares certified regions, and uniform margins each destroy the connectivity planning needs before they deliver soundness. We instead build a planner that certifies its answers. It samples the overlaps and shared faces of the decomposition, prunes with an admissible informed bound, and verifies the one candidate each search round proposes, continuously, by a chain of clearance certificate balls with no resolution parameter; failures are repaired with local in-region detours, and the convex polish is re-verified. Head-to-head on all $29$ task queries it delivers zero invalid answers against $21$ for the reference, reaches its first certified answer in $0.11$,s against $1.59$,s for the reference's unverified one, and reproduces the reference optimum exactly on every query whose reference answer is physically valid.

PixelGoal navigation specifies targets directly in the agent's camera view, providing a natural interface between high-level visual reasoning and low-level navigation. Depth can lift a visible target pixel into a metric PointGoal, but this estimate becomes unreliable under occlusion or sensor noise. Moreover, a PointGoal alone does not encode traversability or feasible paths around obstacles. We present OccPlanner, a goal-aware occupancy-conditioned diffusion planner that learns complementary egocentric goal and planning-oriented 3D representations through metric target and occupancy prediction, respectively. These representations condition a diffusion trajectory module to generate target-directed, obstacle-aware trajectories. For scalable geometric supervision, we introduce L3ROcc, which converts monocular RGB navigation videos into aligned 3D occupancy and trajectory annotations. We train OccPlanner on L3ROcc-processed InternData-N1 and evaluate it in closed-loop simulation across four unseen InternScenes categories and two goal-distance ranges. Across all eight settings, OccPlanner substantially outperforms existing open-source PixelGoal approaches and achieves competitive performance against PointGoal planners with direct metric-goal inputs.

Latent world models are judged by how well they predict, so when planning fails at long horizons the natural reading is that the predictor degrades. On a reproduction of LeWorldModel on TwoRoom we show the binding constraint is the planner's objective instead. The predictor is not the limit: its imagined state seventy-five environment steps ahead is still only 0.189 as wrong as assuming the world froze, while the planner never imagines beyond twenty-five. The objective is. Cross-entropy-method planning minimises squared latent distance, which tracks true distance at r = 0.426, saturates by about eighty arena units and decreases beyond a hundred and twenty, so moving away from the goal can lower the cost. The information is present throughout: a ridge probe recovers position from the frozen embedding at R^2 0.9922. The pathology is the method's, not one reimplementation's. It is present in the authors' released weights, and across four checkpoints long-horizon success rank-orders exactly with metric quality and inversely with prediction accuracy. Replacing only the objective, with nothing retrained and no GPU, lifts goals reached at offset 100 from 26.0% to 98.0%, equals the 98.0% at offset 25, and reaches 92.0% under a third of the budget: planning stops depending on the horizon. The best cost is not the most accurate. A head learned from frame separation alone predicts spatial distance worse than a position probe (r = 0.819 against 0.9897) yet plans better, charging 24% more to cross the environment's dividing wall where squared latent distance charges 4% less. It has learned reachability, not proximity.

The rapid growth of LLM inference is shifting sustainability concerns from one-time training to continuous serving, where infrastructure decisions shape energy use, carbon emissions, water consumption, and service quality. Yet operators often need to compare deployment alternatives before large-scale infrastructure is built, making direct measurement costly, slow, and sometimes infeasible. We present InFactPlanner, a trace-driven decision-support framework for what-if analysis of sustainable AI data center deployment for LLM inference across single and geo-distributed sites. InFactPlanner combines query traces, hardware-model profiles, candidate site configurations, PUE/WUE parameters, renewable generation models, and time-varying grid carbon intensity to estimate power, energy, carbon emissions, water use, latency, and server utilization. The framework abstracts low-level serving effects into configurable hardware-model profiles, enabling rapid comparison of site selection, capacity placement, hardware, model, renewable integration, and routing choices. We validate the energy accounting pipeline by reproducing reference LLM inference energy estimates with less than 10% deviation, evaluate scalability across multiple data centers and server counts, and demonstrate scenario-driven decision analyses for hardware selection, renewable placement, geographic deployment, and carbon-aware routing. Our results show that sustainability-optimal choices can differ from latency-optimal ones, and that the carbon value of deployment depends strongly on the local grid mix.

Recent research in machine and deep learning has shown the potential of learningbased motion planning approaches to improve the driving behavior of automated vehicles, especially in complex environments. However, their complex nature and lack of transparency can hinder explainability and trustworthiness and complicate safety assurance. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a hybrid planning architecture that combines the advantages of machine learning with the verifiability and the determinism of classical approaches. Specifically, we developed a deep neural network to interpret complex traffic scenes and propose driving behavior, while an optimization-based supervision layer validates this proposal and enforces explicit drivability and safety constraints. We evaluate the learned planner's driving behavior in open-loop studies on real-world urban data, discuss system integration aspects for stable closed-loop operation, and report results from real-world deployment on our research vehicle karl..

Autonomous logistics sorting systems (ALSS) are an important industrial application of embodied AI, which requires joint planning over spatially disjoint camera views. We formulate this setting as Joint Multi-Scene Understanding (JMSU). With open-world visual understanding and task-planning capabilities, vision-language models (VLMs) are promising candidates for JMSU. However, directly applying existing VLMs to JMSU is non-trivial due to scarce cross-scene supervision and attention dispersion caused by long visual context in JMSU. To address these challenges, we propose HUGIN, a training framework with two complementary components. Endogenous Data Augmentation recombines verified atomic facts under operating constraints, while Global Context Ranking aligns the instruction representation more strongly with the complete visual context than with a partial visual context. To support ongoing research, we construct a high-quality industrial sorting dataset and benchmark named SortingBench from four layouts of autonomous logistics sorting systems. Across five open VLMs, HUGIN consistently outperforms matched baselines; for example, the accuracy on SortingBench of Qwen3-VL-8B increases from 63.6% to 78.8%. Additional experiments verify the effectiveness of each component and JMSU's spillover benefits in embodied tasks. Deployment tests involving more than 15,000 packages support the practical viability of VLM-based planning for autonomous logistics sorting.

Regulating the latent space to an isotropic Gaussian distribution provides a stable and information-maximized landscape for world model planning. However, the latent space property and successful planning remain disconnected. We first study this by comparing SIGReg and VISReg, two regularization loss functions with the same distribution target but different properties. Compared with SIGReg, VISReg has more flexibility in controlling the weights of center, scale, and shape regularization, and a larger batch size brings a finer distribution approximation. We find that the former, despite being beneficial in self-supervised learning (SSL), does not help the planning, whereas the latter improves the planning success on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets. This motivates a deep understanding of the factors that correlate with the success rate. Unlike the previous metrics focusing on the encoded latent only, we propose the Veracity-Influence-Sobriety score (VIScore), a metric that quantifies the reachability and capacity of a predictor given the encoded feature, and the hallucination of the searching-based planner. Compared with straightness, physical-state probing, and empowerment, we show that, with the measurement covering encoder, predictor, and planner, VIScore explains the success rate better than the others, as reflected by a strong Spearman correlation. Specifically, VIScore consistently achieves a Spearman correlation over 0.75 on both seen and unseen models and datasets on the cross-task success rate pool. Moreover, VIScore is the only metric that has a calibration error below the constant fit across all testing scenarios, showcasing the importance of these three aspects in planning success. We hope this metric can help future studies on world model design and diagnosis.

In motion planning algorithms for tethered mobile robots, the entanglement state of the tether is a critical aspect to consider during the planning phase. This is particularly important in case of a slack tether, where the shape of the tether is not determined solely by the geometry of the environment and the location of the obstacles, but also by the dynamics of the tether, by the trajectory followed by the robot, and possibly by exogenous forces. In this scenario, preventing entanglement requires planning a robot trajectory that accounts for the entanglement definition and for the dynamics of the robot and of the tether. In this work, we propose a motion planning algorithm for tethered mobile robots with a slack tether that computes dynamically feasible entanglement-free trajectories to navigate through an environment with static obstacles. By considering the entanglement state during all the stages of the planning pipeline, we are able to compute safer trajectories that avoid entanglement during the motion of the robot. We achieve this through a three-step pipeline, which includes (i) the construction of a topological model of the entanglement-free configuration space of the tethered robot, (ii) the generation of a set of candidate paths using this model, and (iii) the computation of a dynamically feasible entanglement-free trajectory by solving a homotopy-constrained trajectory generation problem. The resulting trajectory can then be executed to lead the robot to its target location, while maintaining the tether in an entanglement-free configuration. We demonstrate the benefits of this algorithm in simulations, where we show how the planning algorithm avoids violations of the entanglement constraints, resulting in safer and more reliable trajectories.

Incident response planning is critical for restoring compromised software systems after cyberattacks. Common practice relies on expert-driven playbooks that encode fixed response procedures, but these static workflows struggle to adapt to evolving incident states, changing recovery objectives, and execution feedback. Recent LLM-based planners and tool-using agents improve automation, yet they remain unstable in long-horizon response because they lack a unified basis for maintaining incident state, aligning actions with the current recovery stage, and reusing historical experience. We present STAIR, an end-to-end agentic planning framework for incident response. The framework maintains the current incident as Graph-as-State, uses a Stage Router to dispatch planning to stage-specialized agents, and retrieves historical experiences to guide action selection. An Execution Harness executes actions, returns feedback to update the incident state, and validates action effects for future experience reuse. Across 100 Docker-based cyber ranges, our framework achieves a normalized defense score of 0.94 and improves over the strongest baseline by 9.5%.

Many diffusion-based planners enforce safety through inference-time guidance, but such interleaved trajectory deformations often degrade kinematic feasibility due to manifold rupture. We propose Graph-Guided Safe Diffuser (G2SD), a hierarchical framework that leverages a high-level topological graph planner to guide a low-level diffusion model. G2SD enforces safety at a structural level by abstracting the data manifold into a learned latent graph, on which high-level planning is performed. Continuous trajectories are generated by diffusion planners, which are conditioned on the graph node representations selected by the high-level planner. Theoretical analyses demonstrate conditions under which manifold rupture occurs in diffusion planners, and show that G2SD improves safety by reducing the constraint violation probability as the number of segments increases. Experiments demonstrate that G2SD substantially outperforms baselines, increasing goal-reaching rate without any collision from 40-50% to 98% in Maze2D navigation and also achieving superior task scores in locomotion.

Image-goal navigation with latent world models requires not only accurate future prediction, but also a planning cost that reliably ranks candidate action sequences. We define the cost as the cosine distance between the predicted future embedding and the goal embedding, and show that poor cost ordering can mislead sampling-based planners such as Cross-Entropy Method (CEM). To address this, we propose a latent world model built on a frozen DINO-family encoder and train it with two complementary objectives. An autoregressive rollout loss reduces the gap between training and multi-step planning rollouts, while a Monotone Cost Ranking (MCR) loss directly encourages increasingly perturbed action sequences to receive higher planning costs. We also study InfoNCE-based action-contrastive training and find that temporal permutation negatives distort the latent geometry and degrade planning performance. On the GNM navigation dataset, our method outperforms Navigation World Models (NWM), DINO-WM, OmniVLA, and NoMaD, achieving state-of-the-art image-goal navigation performance while reducing orientation error by $2.7\times$ over the same-encoder DINO WM baseline. We also deploy the model zero-shot on a physical robot, where it follows goal-directed paths in unseen indoor and outdoor environments.

Large language model-powered coding agents are increasingly used to modify existing code repositories, for example, by adding features or fixing bugs. Yet existing repository-level benchmarks typically evaluate only whether the final patch passes tests. Satisfying a user request requires a long chain of interdependent reasoning and decisions: an agent must recover explicit and implicit requirements, formulate a repository-grounded implementation plan, and translate it into correct code. A pass/fail outcome cannot characterize how an unsuccessful trajectory diverges from the requirements and implementation process needed for a correct patch. To address this gap, we introduce SWE-RPG, a repository-level benchmark that combines executable patch evaluation with validated ground-truth references (GTs) for (1) Requirement Clarification and (2) Implementation Planning. These intermediate GTs support retrospective, GT-aligned diagnosis of complete coding-agent trajectories across clarification, planning, code generation, and artifact submission. SWE-RPG comprises 163 tasks from 31 Python and Java repositories, including 113 bug fixes and 50 feature additions. We evaluate 3 coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode, with 6 large language model backends, including Claude-Sonnet-5 and GPT-5.6-Terra. Results show that the evaluated popular coding agents still struggle to implement user requests in existing repositories, achieving an average resolved rate of only 31.5% on SWE-RPG. Intermediate-GT diagnosis further identifies implicit requirement recovery as the main bottleneck, accounting for 24.5%--46.0% of agent runs. This result suggests implicit-requirement recovery as a key candidate direction for improving coding agents. The benchmark data and evaluation code are available at https://github.com/Xin-Zhou-smu/SWE-RPG-Bench.

Text-to-music generation has advanced rapidly, but current systems still rely primarily on global text prompts, leaving the structural organization of generated music implicit and difficult to inspect, control, or revise before audio generation. To address this issue, we introduce MusicLayout, an explicit intermediate representation for controlling musical structure in text-to-music generation. MusicLayout describes a musical piece as a time-aligned layout of sections, textures, repetitions, variations, and instrument-level arrangements, serving as an interpretable planning layer between textual intent and the generated music. We integrate MusicLayout into a text-to-music framework built on a unified autoregressive formulation, where the model first generates a MusicLayout representation and subsequently predicts audio tokens conditioned on this representation within a single sequence. The resulting MusicLayout can be inspected and modified prior to audio generation, providing a mechanism for layout-level structural control. We evaluate MusicLayout through layout-conditioned generation, layout manipulation experiments, and matched-data ablations, providing evidence that explicit layout planning can improve long-range structural organization and support layout-level control.