X-Planner: Event-Structured Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence

arXiv:2609.25187v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems often leave this intermediate structure implicit. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) planners also tend to rely on coarse task-level annotations or serialize long reasoning traces token by token. We present X-Planner, a planning front-end that addresses both the supervision and representation of embodied reasoning. Our planning data combine Ego, UMI, and teleoperation under a hierarchy granularity with source-dependent annotation depth. Takeover-time annotations and human-designed failures supervise ongoing error recognition. On the model side, a shared VLM backbone exposes two event-structured plan forms: a discrete interface that emits interpretable event states and a latent interface that relays continuous CoT states across staggered Transformer depths through Staircase Decoding. A frozen latent-to-text reconstruction objective provides a semantic anchor for the latent representation. Offline two-step planning evaluation places X-Planner second among four evaluated models on both BERTScore-F1 and a judge-based Overall score. In real-robot experiments, respectively, outperforming the evaluated baselines. These results characterize planning-text quality and downstream execution.

Related

• HiMe: Hierarchical Embodied Memory for Long-Horizon Vision-Language-Action Control
• Explicit Language Memory for Long-Horizon Planning in Vision-Language-Action Models
• APIVOT: Adaptive Planning with Interleaved Vision-Language Thoughts
• GAVEL: Graph World Models for Verified and Efficient Long-Horizon LLM Task Planning
• Fast Plans, Faithful Actions: Closing the Planning-Execution Gap in Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action Models

Source: arXiv cs.AI | 2026-10-01