Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
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Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances
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abstract
Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack real-world experience, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given embodiment. For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to perform this task in a particular environment. We propose to provide real-world grounding by means of pretrained skills, which are used to constrain the model to propose natural language actions that are both feasible and contextually appropriate. The robot can act as the language model's "hands and eyes," while the language model supplies high-level semantic knowledge about the task. We show how low-level skills can be combined with large language models so that the language model provides high-level knowledge about the procedures for performing complex and temporally-extended instructions, while value functions associated with these skills provide the grounding necessary to connect this knowledge to a particular physical environment. We evaluate our method on a number of real-world robotic tasks, where we show the need for real-world grounding and that this approach is capable of completing long-horizon, abstract, natural language instructions on a mobile manipulator. The project's website and the video can be found at https://say-can.github.io/.
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- abstract Large language models can encode a wealth of semantic knowledge about the world. Such knowledge could be extremely useful to robots aiming to act upon high-level, temporally extended instructions expressed in natural language. However, a significant weakness of language models is that they lack real-world experience, which makes it difficult to leverage them for decision making within a given embodiment. For example, asking a language model to describe how to clean a spill might result in a reasonable narrative, but it may not be applicable to a particular agent, such as a robot, that needs to
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representative citing papers
A unified threat model for LLM-enabled robots reveals three cross-boundary attack chains from user input to unsafe physical actuation due to missing validations and unmediated crossings.
Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
Mind2Web is the first large-scale dataset of real-world web tasks for developing generalist language-guided agents that complete complex actions on diverse websites.
PAL improves few-shot reasoning accuracy by having LLMs generate executable programs rather than text-based chains of thought, outperforming much larger models on math and logic benchmarks.
Language models generate robot policy code from natural language commands via few-shot prompting, enabling spatial-geometric reasoning, generalization, and precise control on real robots.
SDP constructs a task-induced state space from raw text by having agents commit to and certify natural-language predicates as states, enabling structured planning and analysis in unstructured language environments.
VeGAS improves MLLM-based embodied agents by sampling action ensembles and using a verifier trained on LLM-synthesized failure cases, yielding up to 36% relative gains on hard multi-object long-horizon tasks in Habitat and ALFRED.
BARISTA introduces a densely annotated egocentric coffee-preparation video dataset and multi-task benchmark that reveals performance variation across models on compositional visual tasks.
SkillSmith is a boundary-first compiler-runtime system that turns skill packages into minimal executable interfaces, cutting token usage 57%, thinking iterations 43%, and solve time 51% versus raw skill injection on SkillsBench.
ECHO organizes VLA experiences into a hierarchical memory tree in hyperbolic space via autoencoder and entailment constraints, delivering a 12.8% success-rate gain on LIBERO-Long over the pi0 baseline.
Explanations scored higher by an LLM-plus-planner model are judged more helpful by people and produce measurably better navigation performance in uncertain environments than lower-scored or no explanations.
Action Agent pairs LLM-driven video generation with a flow-constrained diffusion transformer to produce velocity commands, raising video success to 86% and delivering 64.7% real-world navigation on a Unitree G1 humanoid.
A multimodal transformer generates and caches interleaved text-image traces to guide closed-loop actions, achieving 92.4% success on LIBERO-Long and 95.5% average on LIBERO.
A 48-camera residential platform delivers real-time occlusion-robust 3D perception and coordinated actuation for multi-human multi-robot interaction in a shared home workspace.
A cross-version swap protocol reveals dominant skills that swing composition success by up to 50 percentage points, and an atomic probe with selective revalidation governs updates at lower cost than always re-testing full compositions.
AeroBridge-TTA achieves +22 pt average gains on out-of-distribution UAV dynamics mismatches by updating a latent state online from observed transitions in a language-conditioned policy.
SAGR builds a semantic area graph from occupancy maps so LLMs can assign rooms to robots for language-guided search, staying competitive with standard exploration while improving semantic target finding by up to 18.8% in large environments.
ADAPT augments planners with affordance reasoning to raise task success in environments with unspecified and time-varying object affordances, and a LoRA-finetuned VLM backend beats GPT-4o on the new DynAfford benchmark.
Self-Correcting RAG formalizes retrieval as MMKP to maximize information density under token limits and uses NLI-guided MCTS to validate faithfulness, raising accuracy and cutting hallucinations on six multi-hop QA and fact-checking datasets.
GUIDE decomposes GUI agent evaluation into trajectory segmentation, subtask diagnosis, and overall summary to deliver higher accuracy and structured error reports than holistic baselines.
VP-VLA decouples high-level reasoning from low-level control in VLA models by rendering spatial anchors as visual prompts directly in the RGB observation space, outperforming end-to-end baselines.
ST-BiBench reveals a coordination paradox in which MLLMs show strong high-level strategic reasoning yet fail at fine-grained 16-dimensional bimanual action synthesis and multi-stream fusion.
Spatiotemporal robustness is formalized as a Pareto-optimal set of spatial-temporal perturbations for temporal logic tasks, with tractable under-approximating semantics and monitoring algorithms.
citing papers explorer
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Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
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From Prompt to Physical Actuation: Holistic Threat Modeling of LLM-Enabled Robotic Systems
A unified threat model for LLM-enabled robots reveals three cross-boundary attack chains from user input to unsafe physical actuation due to missing validations and unmediated crossings.
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Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution
Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
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Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Web
Mind2Web is the first large-scale dataset of real-world web tasks for developing generalist language-guided agents that complete complex actions on diverse websites.
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PAL: Program-aided Language Models
PAL improves few-shot reasoning accuracy by having LLMs generate executable programs rather than text-based chains of thought, outperforming much larger models on math and logic benchmarks.
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Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control
Language models generate robot policy code from natural language commands via few-shot prompting, enabling spatial-geometric reasoning, generalization, and precise control on real robots.
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State-Centric Decision Process
SDP constructs a task-induced state space from raw text by having agents commit to and certify natural-language predicates as states, enabling structured planning and analysis in unstructured language environments.
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Think Twice, Act Once: Verifier-Guided Action Selection For Embodied Agents
VeGAS improves MLLM-based embodied agents by sampling action ensembles and using a verifier trained on LLM-synthesized failure cases, yielding up to 36% relative gains on hard multi-object long-horizon tasks in Habitat and ALFRED.
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BARISTA: A Multi-Task Egocentric Benchmark for Compositional Visual Understanding
BARISTA introduces a densely annotated egocentric coffee-preparation video dataset and multi-task benchmark that reveals performance variation across models on compositional visual tasks.
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SkillSmith: Compiling Agent Skills into Boundary-Guided Runtime Interfaces
SkillSmith is a boundary-first compiler-runtime system that turns skill packages into minimal executable interfaces, cutting token usage 57%, thinking iterations 43%, and solve time 51% versus raw skill injection on SkillsBench.
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ECHO: Continuous Hierarchical Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models
ECHO organizes VLA experiences into a hierarchical memory tree in hyperbolic space via autoencoder and entailment constraints, delivering a 12.8% success-rate gain on LIBERO-Long over the pi0 baseline.
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Effective Explanations Support Planning Under Uncertainty
Explanations scored higher by an LLM-plus-planner model are judged more helpful by people and produce measurably better navigation performance in uncertain environments than lower-scored or no explanations.
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Action Agent: Agentic Video Generation Meets Flow-Constrained Diffusion
Action Agent pairs LLM-driven video generation with a flow-constrained diffusion transformer to produce velocity commands, raising video success to 86% and delivering 64.7% real-world navigation on a Unitree G1 humanoid.
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Thinking in Text and Images: Interleaved Vision--Language Reasoning Traces for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation
A multimodal transformer generates and caches interleaved text-image traces to guide closed-loop actions, achieving 92.4% success on LIBERO-Long and 95.5% average on LIBERO.
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OmniRobotHome: A Multi-Camera Platform for Real-Time Multiadic Human-Robot Interaction
A 48-camera residential platform delivers real-time occlusion-robust 3D perception and coordinated actuation for multi-human multi-robot interaction in a shared home workspace.
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Atomic-Probe Governance for Skill Updates in Compositional Robot Policies
A cross-version swap protocol reveals dominant skills that swing composition success by up to 50 percentage points, and an atomic probe with selective revalidation governs updates at lower cost than always re-testing full compositions.
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AeroBridge-TTA: Test-Time Adaptive Language-Conditioned Control for UAVs
AeroBridge-TTA achieves +22 pt average gains on out-of-distribution UAV dynamics mismatches by updating a latent state online from observed transitions in a language-conditioned policy.
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Semantic Area Graph Reasoning for Multi-Robot Language-Guided Search
SAGR builds a semantic area graph from occupancy maps so LLMs can assign rooms to robots for language-guided search, staying competitive with standard exploration while improving semantic target finding by up to 18.8% in large environments.
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ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints
ADAPT augments planners with affordance reasoning to raise task success in environments with unspecified and time-varying object affordances, and a LoRA-finetuned VLM backend beats GPT-4o on the new DynAfford benchmark.
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Self-Correcting RAG: Enhancing Faithfulness via MMKP Context Selection and NLI-Guided MCTS
Self-Correcting RAG formalizes retrieval as MMKP to maximize information density under token limits and uses NLI-guided MCTS to validate faithfulness, raising accuracy and cutting hallucinations on six multi-hop QA and fact-checking datasets.
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GUIDE: Interpretable GUI Agent Evaluation via Hierarchical Diagnosis
GUIDE decomposes GUI agent evaluation into trajectory segmentation, subtask diagnosis, and overall summary to deliver higher accuracy and structured error reports than holistic baselines.
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VP-VLA: Visual Prompting as an Interface for Vision-Language-Action Models
VP-VLA decouples high-level reasoning from low-level control in VLA models by rendering spatial anchors as visual prompts directly in the RGB observation space, outperforming end-to-end baselines.
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ST-BiBench: Benchmarking Multi-Stream Multimodal Coordination in Bimanual Embodied Tasks for MLLMs
ST-BiBench reveals a coordination paradox in which MLLMs show strong high-level strategic reasoning yet fail at fine-grained 16-dimensional bimanual action synthesis and multi-stream fusion.
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Spatiotemporal Robustness of Temporal Logic Tasks using Multi-Objective Reasoning
Spatiotemporal robustness is formalized as a Pareto-optimal set of spatial-temporal perturbations for temporal logic tasks, with tractable under-approximating semantics and monitoring algorithms.
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DarkQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Visual-Primitive Question Answering in Low-Light Indoor Scenes
DarkQA is a new benchmark that measures vision-language model performance on basic visual questions under controlled low-light degradations modeled from real camera physics.
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Large Video Planner Enables Generalizable Robot Control
A video foundation model trained on human demonstrations generates zero-shot plans that convert to executable robot actions on novel scenes and tasks.
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$\tau$-bench: A Benchmark for Tool-Agent-User Interaction in Real-World Domains
τ-bench shows state-of-the-art agents like GPT-4o succeed on under 50% of tool-using, rule-following tasks and are inconsistent across repeated trials.
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Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators
UniSim learns a universal real-world simulator from orchestrated diverse datasets, enabling zero-shot deployment of policies trained purely in simulation.
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VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models
VoxPoser uses LLMs to compose 3D value maps via VLM interaction for model-based synthesis of robust robot trajectories on open-set language-specified manipulation tasks.
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Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models
Voyager achieves superior lifelong learning in Minecraft by combining an automatic exploration curriculum, a library of executable skills, and iterative LLM prompting with environment feedback, yielding 3.3x more unique items and 15.3x faster milestone unlocks than prior methods while generalizing技能
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LLM+P: Empowering Large Language Models with Optimal Planning Proficiency
LLM+P lets LLMs solve planning problems optimally by converting them to PDDL for classical planners and back to natural language.
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Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning
Reflexion lets LLM agents improve via stored verbal reflections on task feedback, reaching 91% pass@1 on HumanEval and outperforming prior GPT-4 results.
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A Generalist Agent
Gato is a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy using one transformer network to handle text, vision, games, and robotics tasks.
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DexHoldem: Playing Texas Hold'em with Dexterous Embodied System
DexHoldem is a new benchmark providing 1,470 teleoperated demonstrations across 14 manipulation primitives, plus standardized tests for dexterous policy execution and agentic perception in a physical Texas Hold'em setting.
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SPIKE: An Adaptive Dual Controller Framework for Cost-Efficient Long-Horizon Game Agents
SPIKE dual-controller framework raises success rates 5-9 points and cuts tokens 55% in StarDojo agents by reusing strategic plans across stable segments and escalating only at detected events.
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TAME: Test-Time Adversarial Prompt Tuning via Mixture-of-Experts for Vision-Language Models
TAME uses a Mixture-of-Experts prompt bank with input-dependent routing and three unsupervised objectives to adaptively defend CLIP against adversarial attacks at inference time, achieving at least 49.1% robustness gain on 11 datasets.
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How to Instruct Your Robot: Dense Language Annotations Power Robot Policy Learning
DeMiAn re-annotates robot and egocentric videos with VLM-generated dense labels across motion, scene, pose, and reasoning aspects, then uses a learned instructor to boost policy success by 5 points on RoboCasa over task-only baselines.
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NORM-Nav: Zero-Shot Mobile Robot Navigation with Natural Language Behavioral Constraints
NORM-Nav is a zero-shot framework that parses natural language behavioral constraints with an LLM, grounds them via vision-LiDAR, and encodes them as multi-layer costmaps for grid-based robot navigation.
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Offline Semantic Guidance for Efficient Vision-Language-Action Policy Distillation
VLA-AD distills 7B VLA teachers into 158M students using offline VLM semantic guidance on task phases and directions, matching teacher performance on LIBERO with 44x size reduction and 3.28x speedup.
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ScreenSearch: Uncertainty-Aware OS Exploration
ScreenSearch combines structural screen retrieval and deduplication with an ambiguity-aware PUCT graph-bandit to collect over 1M screenshots and 30K deduplicated states across 11 desktop applications, showing a novelty-ambiguity trade-off in exploration policies.
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Towards Long-horizon Embodied Agents with Tool-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Models
VLAs-as-Tools pairs a VLM planner with specialized VLA executors via a new interface and Tool-Aligned Post-Training to raise long-horizon robot success rates on LIBERO-Long and RoboTwin benchmarks.
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When Should an AI Workflow Release? Always-Valid Inference for Black-Box Generate-Verify Systems
A wrapper for black-box generate-verify AI pipelines that uses a conservative hard-negative reference pool and e-processes to control the probability of releasing on infeasible tasks while permitting release on feasible ones.
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PriorZero: Bridging Language Priors and World Models for Decision Making
PriorZero uses root-only LLM prior injection in MCTS and alternating world-model training with LLM fine-tuning to raise exploration efficiency and final performance on Jericho text games and BabyAI gridworlds.
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Weighted Rules under the Stable Model Semantics
Weighted rules extend stable model semantics to support probabilistic reasoning, model ranking, and statistical inference in answer set programs.
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Kintsugi: Learning Policies by Repairing Executable Knowledge Bases
Kintsugi learns policies by repairing composable executable knowledge bases through agentic diagnosis, localized typed edits, and deterministic verification gates that admit only improvements.
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RePO-VLA: Recovery-Driven Policy Optimization for Vision-Language-Action Models
RePO-VLA raises average adversarial success rates in VLA manipulation from 20% to 75% by using recovery-aware initialization, a progress-aware semantic value function, and value-conditioned refinement on success and corrective trajectories.
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Escaping the Diversity Trap in Robotic Manipulation via Anchor-Centric Adaptation
Anchor-Centric Adaptation escapes the diversity trap by prioritizing repeated demonstrations at core anchors over broad coverage, yielding higher success rates under fixed data budgets in robotic manipulation.
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TriRelVLA: Triadic Relational Structure for Generalizable Embodied Manipulation
TriRelVLA introduces triadic object-hand-task relational representations and a task-grounded graph transformer with a relational bottleneck to improve generalization in robotic manipulation across scenes, objects, and tasks.
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Creative Robot Tool Use by Counterfactual Reasoning
Robots discover causal tool features through VLM suggestions and physics-based counterfactual perturbations in simulation, then transfer manipulation skills via conditioned keypoint matching.
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Information Coordination as a Bridge: A Neuro-Symbolic Architecture for Reliable Autonomous Driving Scene Understanding
InfoCoordiBridge coordinates multi-sensor perception outputs into a single conflict-aware SceneSummary before reasoning to improve consistency and reduce hallucinations in autonomous driving scene understanding.