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X-Planner introduces an event-structured planning front-end for embodied intelligence, addressing the limitations of implicit reasoning in modern Vision-Language-Action systems. By combining discrete interpretable states with continuous chain-of-thought representations via Staircase Decoding, it improves task execution quality in long-horizon manipulation scenarios. This work advances the structural clarity of AI-driven robot planning without relying on incidental hardware or non-AI topics.
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X-Planner: Event-Structured Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence

arXiv2 min read

arXiv:2609.25187v1 Announce Type: new 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.

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.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.25187 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2609.25187v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.25187 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 262 words

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