arXiv:2601. 00969v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong action priors for robotic manipulation, but their reactive behavior can fail under distribution shift and long-horizon task structure.
By Ke Ren, Ali Salamatian, Kieran Pattison, Cyrus Neary
The paper investigates Joint-Embedding Predictive World Models (JEPA-WMs), a class of methods that perform planning in a learned representation space rather than raw input space. It systematically studies how model architecture, training objectives, and planning algorithms influence success across simulated and real‑world robotic tasks, and proposes a JEPA-WM variant that surpasses established baselines in navigation and manipulation. The authors provide code, data, and checkpoints for reproducibility.
By Basile Terver, Tsung-Yen Yang, Jean Ponce, Adrien Bardes, Yann LeCun
arXiv:2607. 08894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise in multi-step planning tasks, but existing approaches like LATS (Language Agent Tree Search) and ReAct rely heavily on LLM inference during planning, leading to high computational costs and stochastic behavior.
By Maureese Williams, Dymitr Nowicki
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise in multi-step planning tasks, but existing approaches like LATS (Language Agent Tree Search) and ReAct rely heavily on LLM inference during planning, leading to high computational costs and stochastic behavior. We present \textbf{GATS} (Graph-Augmented Tree Search), a planning framework that combines systematic UCB1-based tree search with a layered world model to eliminate LLM calls during inference while achieving superior planning performance.
Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models (RP1) is a novel method that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and to improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. It is the first approach to fully learn plan improvement and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using far fewer roll‑outs and running up to 67× faster than the strongest alternative.
By Armin Sommer, Jannik Schilling
Reinforced Planning with Latent World Models introduces RP1, a neural planner that learns to evaluate imagined outcomes via a critic and improve multi‑step plans through an optimizer trained offline on world‑model roll‑outs. Unlike existing planners that are hand‑designed or only inform policies, RP1 fully learns to refine plans and can be attached to any pretrained latent world model. In experiments on visual navigation, arm reaching, and robotic manipulation, RP1 outperforms hand‑designed search algorithms, achieving near‑perfect success while using 1,000× fewer roll‑outs and up to 67× faster inference.
arXiv:2607. 15065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive world models enable robots to plan by imagining the outcomes of their actions, but their value for control hinges on generating many rollouts quickly.
By Susie Lu, Haonan Chen, Weirui Ye, Yilun Du
The paper introduces an LLM chaining architecture for General Purpose Service Robots that splits instruction classification and action generation into two stages, cutting prompt length by about 45% and boosting planning consistency. Evaluation on 100 synthetic GPSR commands across three language models shows consistent improvements over single-prompt methods, with up to +37 percentage points gain on local models. Real‑robot trials on the Toyota HSR confirm that while planning success improves, execution-layer failures remain the main obstacle to full task completion.
By Lucas Da Mota Bruno, Jiahao Sim, Yoshinobu Hagiwara
The paper demonstrates that planners using frozen visual world models can achieve better control by changing the target used for action scoring. Instead of scoring actions solely by distance to the final goal image, the authors propose Anchored Planning, which retrieves a recorded trajectory segment that matches the current and goal observations and then scores actions toward an intermediate observation shortly after the segment’s start. Experiments on Cube, PushT, Reacher, and TwoRoom show that this intermediate-target approach outperforms the released LeWM planner on all long‑range tasks, while simple final‑goal search fails to achieve the same gains.
By Xvyuan Liu, Jianjie Fang, Chen Gao, Yong Li
GAVEL is a framework that uses an explicit graph world model to verify and repair long‑horizon plans generated by large language models (LLMs). The graph encodes object relations, action pre‑conditions and effects, and probabilistic beliefs about unobserved object locations, allowing the system to predict action outcomes, detect violations, and repair them before execution. In experiments on BEHAVIOR‑1K, GAVEL boosts single‑task success from 41.2 % to 91.8 % and multi‑task success from 19.9 % to 92.6 %, while also reducing travel distance by about 5.4 % compared with a static variant.
By Ruiyang Wang, Hao-Lun Hsu, Swarajh Mehta, Jiwoo Kim, Zhihao Dou, Miroslav Pajic
arXiv:2609.39235v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World models offer a promising way to help robots understand how the physical world evolves and plan complex behaviours through imagination. Yet exis...
By Ali Alrasheed, Basim Azam, Naveed Akhtar
The paper investigates how inaccuracies in pretrained occupancy networks affect active mapping robots that select camera viewpoints to reconstruct unknown 3D scenes. By fixing the planner and varying the occupancy representation—ranging from no completion to ground‑truth occupancy—the authors find that correcting false positives or false negatives alone does not reliably improve coverage, highlighting a disconnect between occupancy accuracy and planning performance. They propose a dynamic filtering strategy that retains predictions in unexplored space while suppressing unsupported occupancy based on online observations, which preliminarily shows it can steer viewpoint selection toward reachable surfaces that would otherwise remain unseen.
By Jiahui Zhang, Gongbo Liang, Yu Zhang