Abstract:World models are becoming central to robotic planning and control, as they enable prediction of future state transitions. Existing approaches often emphasize video generation or natural language prediction, which are difficult to directly ground in robot actions and suffer from compounding errors over long horizons. Traditional task and motion planning relies on symbolic logic world models, such as planning domains, that are robot-executable and robust for long-horizon reasoning. However, these methods typically operate independently of visual perception, preventing synchronized symbolic and perceptual state prediction. We propose a Hierarchical World Model (H-WM) that jointly predicts logical and visual state transitions within a unified bilevel framework. H-WM combines a high-level logical world model with a low-level visual world model, integrating the robot-executable, long-horizon robustness of symbolic reasoning with perceptual grounding from visual observations. The hierarchical outputs provide stable and consistent intermediate guidance for long-horizon tasks, mitigating error accumulation and enabling robust execution across extended task sequences. To train H-WM, we introduce a robotic dataset that aligns robot motion with symbolic states, actions, and visual observations. Experiments across vision-language-action (VLA) control policies demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of the approach.
Abstract:Pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in solving planning problems but often struggle to ensure plan correctness, especially for long-horizon tasks. Meanwhile, traditional robotic task and motion planning (TAMP) frameworks address these challenges more reliably by combining high-level symbolic search with low-level motion planning. At the core of TAMP is the planning domain, an abstract world representation defined through symbolic predicates and actions. However, creating these domains typically involves substantial manual effort and domain expertise, limiting generalizability. We introduce Planning Domain Derivation with LLMs (PDDLLM), a novel approach that combines simulated physical interaction with LLM reasoning to improve planning performance. The method reduces reliance on humans by inferring planning domains from a single annotated task-execution demonstration. Unlike prior domain-inference methods that rely on partially predefined or language descriptions of planning domains, PDDLLM constructs domains entirely from scratch and automatically integrates them with low-level motion planning skills, enabling fully automated long-horizon planning. PDDLLM is evaluated on over 1,200 diverse tasks spanning nine environments and benchmarked against six LLM-based planning baselines, demonstrating superior long-horizon planning performance, lower token costs, and successful deployment on multiple physical robot platforms.




Abstract:Task and motion planning (TAMP) frameworks address long and complex planning problems by integrating high-level task planners with low-level motion planners. However, existing TAMP methods rely heavily on the manual design of planning domains that specify the preconditions and postconditions of all high-level actions. This paper proposes a method to automate planning domain inference from a handful of test-time trajectory demonstrations, reducing the reliance on human design. Our approach incorporates a deep learning-based estimator that predicts the appropriate components of a domain for a new task and a search algorithm that refines this prediction, reducing the size and ensuring the utility of the inferred domain. Our method is able to generate new domains from minimal demonstrations at test time, enabling robots to handle complex tasks more efficiently. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms behavior cloning baselines, which directly imitate planner behavior, in terms of planning performance and generalization across a variety of tasks. Additionally, our method reduces computational costs and data amount requirements at test time for inferring new planning domains.