arXiv AI

When Should a Robot Think? Resource-Aware Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Embodied Robotic Decision-Making

The paper introduces RARRL, a hierarchical framework that learns when and how an embodied robotic agent should invoke large language model reasoning. By adaptively deciding whether to reason, selecting the reasoning role, and allocating computational budget based on observations, execution history, and remaining resources, RARRL improves task success rates and reduces execution latency. Experiments on the ALFRED benchmark demonstrate that this resource‑aware orchestration outperforms fixed or heuristic reasoning strategies, highlighting the importance of adaptive reasoning control for reliable robotic agents.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

$R^3$: Training Robots to Reason in Natural Language via Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces $R^3$, a post‑training method that converts vision‑language models into robotic reasoners by first mid‑training on expert reasoning traces and then refining them with single‑step rubric‑based reinforcement learning. $R^3$ enables free‑form language reasoning to guide low‑level manipulation policies, improving exploration, generalization, and performance on long‑horizon tasks in Language Table and simulated bimanual grocery packing benchmarks. The approach outperforms instruction‑only imitation learning baselines and demonstrates that natural language reasoning can serve as a test‑time compute mechanism for steering robotic actions.

By Lehong Wu, Yuxiao Qu, Zheyuan Hu, Ivan Zhang, Limin Wei, Zackory Erickson, Aviral Kumar
arXiv AI
Aug 5

PACE: Adaptive Budget Allocation for Time-Efficient Embodied Planning

arXiv:2608. 03034v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning-enhanced large language models have achieved remarkable improvements in planning tasks, yet their deployment in embodied systems remains impractical due to prohibitive inference delays-often exceeding minutes per planning instance.

By Yuchen Huang, Xijiang Ying, Zhenhua Ma, Xiaxiang Yuan, Zhijie Gao, Jiayi Huang, Ruichi Mao, Jiazheng Zhang, Hongsheng Ti, Maotao Tian, Rong Shi, Lu Zhao, Shizhuang Zhang, Zhuo Cui, He Wang, Ling Liu, Wei Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 12

MAGMA-Bench: Evaluating Long-Horizon Embodied Agents under Dynamic Tasks and Execution Failures

MAGMA-Bench is an architecture‑agnostic benchmark designed to evaluate long‑horizon embodied agents in dynamic multi‑robot environments. It tests agents across increasing task horizons and introduces controlled online perturbations such as execution failures, task interruptions, and mission updates, while requiring coordination among robots with heterogeneous capabilities. The benchmark separates task‑level reasoning from perception and low‑level control through a structured skill‑level interface and provides 261,646 task‑level training examples along with an expert‑trace generation pipeline.

By Loan Bernat (LAAS-GEPETTO), Matthieu Grard (LAAS-RAP), Ariane Herbulot (LAAS-RAP), Florent Lamiraux (LAAS-GEPETTO)
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Don't Overthink, Don't Underthink: Toward Adaptive Reasoning in Agentic AI

The paper argues that large language models need adaptive reasoning rather than fixed reasoning budgets. It shows that over‑reasoning leads to high computational cost without accuracy gains, while under‑reasoning results in incorrect or incomplete solutions. The authors evaluate these failure modes on MATH‑500 and the GAIA benchmark, highlighting the need for dynamic reasoning allocation in agentic AI systems.

By Md Jueal Mia, M. Hadi Amini