arXiv AI

CABTO: Context-Aware Behavior Tree Grounding for Robot Manipulation

arXiv:2603. 16809v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Trees (BTs) offer a powerful paradigm for designing modular and reactive robot controllers.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

World Action Planner: Generalizable Robot Decision-Making with Action-Conditioned World Models

World Action Planner is a robot planning system that uses an action-conditioned world model to search for and compose executable action plans. The agent performs a coarse-to-fine search: first a global action optimization over imagined rollouts to spot potential failures, then a local action search comparing neighboring candidates to pick the best action. In compositional long-horizon tasks, novel object layouts, and real‑robot planning without expert demonstrations, it consistently outperforms state‑of‑the‑art end‑to‑end generalist policies and VLM planners.

By Xiangcheng Zhang, Runhan Huang, Yilun Du
arXiv AI
Sep 28

SUN: Agentic Robot Policy Learning with Persistent Task Programs

The paper introduces SUN (Semantically UNified) Programs, typed executables that translate grounded relations into optimal control objectives, satisfaction predicates, and learning rewards. Using the Kuafu harness, a foundation model orchestrates scene preparation, verification, residual reinforcement learning, and data generation, repairing candidate programs and calibrating reward weights. Across nine multi‑stage manipulation tasks, Kuafu achieves an 82.03% success rate, outperforms learned baselines, generates demonstrations 10.57× faster than human teleoperation, and transfers zero‑shot to physical Franka and Kinova robots.

By Weiqi Wang, Zhi Li, Yudong Lei, David Martinez, Xiaofeng Gao, Yuxin Jiang, Chenfanfu Jiang, Yingnian Wu, Demetri Terzopoulos, Ran Gong
arXiv AI
Jul 28

A Few Words Go a Long Way: Language Guided Robot Policy Synthesis

arXiv:2607. 23784v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While vision-language-action models have demonstrated impressive zero-shot manipulation capabilities, they remain fundamentally black box policies that are difficult to interpret, adapt, or correct when they inevitably fail.

By Daphne Chen, Archit Ritesh Jain, Eric Goossen, Emma Romig, Michael Murray, Nick Walker, Maya Cakmak
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Bridging Thought and Action: Taming Long-Horizon Instability in Open-Source LLM Agents with a MetaTool-Enhanced ROS Framework

The paper introduces a ROS-Agent architecture that enhances task reliability and execution efficiency for open‑source LLM‑powered robotic agents. It adds a MetaTool that forces the LLM to produce a structured pseudo‑code plan before any action, storing this plan in a scratchpad to separate planning from execution. Experiments on a custom mobile robot show up to ~24% improvement in complex task completion and contextual consistency compared to the baseline.

By Kazi Abrar Mahmud, Nilotpaul Kundu Dhurubo, Tamal Kirttonia, Sabbir Hossain Ujjal, Mohammad Ariful Haque
arXiv AI
Aug 18

NebulaVLA: A Dual-Frequency Vision-Language-Action Model With Guide Action for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2608. 16503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world deployment of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is often bottlenecked by efficiency-performance trade-offs, cross-embodiment generalization, and execution smoothness.

By Cong Zhao, Shuai Tian, Xu Zhang, Baocheng Ni, Xinguo Song, Xueying Sun, Shu Jiang, Shouchang Yang, Bo Tang, Jin Deng, Ge Zhu, YongCheng Wang, Jin Xu, Ri Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 28

STEP: State-Aware Task Estimation and Planning with Multi-Modal LLMs for Human-Robot Collaboration

The paper introduces STEP, a State‑Aware Task Estimator and Planner that uses multi‑modal large language models to explicitly estimate system states and predict state transitions during task planning. By forecasting future states alongside actions, STEP reduces hallucinated actions and improves task‑convergent planning. In a simulated robot assembly task, STEP outperforms the state‑of‑the‑art by 32.8% in action executability and 14.8% in final‑state error.

By Maitrey Gramopadhye, Prakash Baskaran, Xiao Liu, Songpo Li, Soshi Iba