H-WM: Robotic Task and Motion Planning Guided by Hierarchical World Model

Abstract:World models are becoming central to robotic planning and control by predicting future state transitions. Existing approaches mainly rely on visual, latent, or language prediction, which can be difficult to ground in executable robot actions and prone to compounding errors over long horizons. In contrast, traditional robotic task and motion planning enables structured long-horizon reasoning through compact symbolic representations of world transitions, but typically lacks synchronized visual prediction. We propose Hierarchical World Model (H-WM), which jointly predicts logical and visual state transitions by combining a high-level logical world model with a low-level visual world model. The predicted logical actions and latent visual state transitions are jointly incorporated into Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models as intermediate state guidance for long-horizon task execution. Experiments on three long-horizon benchmarks and real robots show that H-WM consistently improves VLA's performance by stabilizing long-horizon execution and mitigating error accumulation. We also construct LIBERO-Logic, a frame-level aligned dataset that pairs visual observations and continuous robot states with logical actions and predicate-based logical states.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2602.11291 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2602.11291v3 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.11291 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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