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 Planning & Scheduling


A Physics-Informed Neural Network Approach for UAV Path Planning in Dynamic Environments

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating in dynamic wind fields must generate safe and energy-efficient trajectories under physical and environmental constraints. Traditional planners, such as A* and kinodynamic RRT*, often yield suboptimal or non-smooth paths due to discretization and sampling limitations. This paper presents a physics-informed neural network (PINN) framework that embeds UAV dynamics, wind disturbances, and obstacle avoidance directly into the learning process. Without requiring supervised data, the PINN learns dynamically feasible and collision-free trajectories by minimizing physical residuals and risk-aware objectives. Comparative simulations show that the proposed method outperforms A* and Kino-RRT* in control energy, smoothness, and safety margin, while maintaining similar flight efficiency. The results highlight the potential of physics-informed learning to unify model-based and data-driven planning, providing a scalable and physically consistent framework for UAV trajectory optimization.


DecoupleSearch: Decouple Planning and Search via Hierarchical Reward Modeling

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems have emerged as a pivotal methodology for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) through the dynamic integration of external knowledge. To further improve RAG's flexibility, Agentic RAG introduces autonomous agents into the workflow. However, Agentic RAG faces several challenges: (1) the success of each step depends on both high-quality planning and accurate search, (2) the lack of supervision for intermediate reasoning steps, and (3) the exponentially large candidate space for planning and searching. To address these challenges, we propose DecoupleSearch, a novel framework that decouples planning and search processes using dual value models, enabling independent optimization of plan reasoning and search grounding. Our approach constructs a reasoning tree, where each node represents planning and search steps. We leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search to assess the quality of each step. During inference, Hierarchical Beam Search iteratively refines planning and search candidates with dual value models. Extensive experiments across policy models of varying parameter sizes, demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.


Beyond Pipelines: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift toward Model-Native Agentic AI

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The rapid evolution of agentic AI marks a new phase in artificial intelligence, where Large Language Models (LLMs) no longer merely respond but act, reason, and adapt. This survey traces the paradigm shift in building agentic AI: from Pipeline-based systems, where planning, tool use, and memory are orchestrated by external logic, to the emerging Model-native paradigm, where these capabilities are internalized within the model's parameters. We first position Reinforcement Learning (RL) as the algorithmic engine enabling this paradigm shift. By reframing learning from imitating static data to outcome-driven exploration, RL underpins a unified solution of LLM + RL + Task across language, vision and embodied domains. Building on this, the survey systematically reviews how each capability -- Planning, Tool use, and Memory -- has evolved from externally scripted modules to end-to-end learned behaviors. Furthermore, it examines how this paradigm shift has reshaped major agent applications, specifically the Deep Research agent emphasizing long-horizon reasoning and the GUI agent emphasizing embodied interaction. We conclude by discussing the continued internalization of agentic capabilities like Multi-agent collaboration and Reflection, alongside the evolving roles of the system and model layers in future agentic AI. Together, these developments outline a coherent trajectory toward model-native agentic AI as an integrated learning and interaction framework, marking the transition from constructing systems that apply intelligence to developing models that grow intelligence through experience.


Pretraining a Unified PDDL Domain from Real-World Demonstrations for Generalizable Robot Task Planning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Robotic task planning in real-world environments requires reasoning over implicit constraints from language and vision. While LLMs and VLMs offer strong priors, they struggle with long-horizon structure and symbolic grounding. Existing methods that combine LLMs with symbolic planning often rely on handcrafted or narrow domains, limiting generalization. We propose UniDomain, a framework that pre-trains a PDDL domain from robot manipulation demonstrations and applies it for online robotic task planning. It extracts atomic domains from 12,393 manipulation videos to form a unified domain with 3137 operators, 2875 predicates, and 16481 causal edges. Given a target class of tasks, it retrieves relevant atomics from the unified domain and systematically fuses them into high-quality meta-domains to support compositional generalization in planning. Experiments on diverse real-world tasks show that UniDomain solves complex, unseen tasks in a zero-shot manner, achieving up to 58% higher task success and 160% improvement in plan optimality over state-of-the-art LLM and LLM-PDDL baselines.


Investigating Scale Independent UCT Exploration Factor Strategies

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The Upper Confidence Bounds For Trees (UCT) algorithm is not agnostic to the reward scale of the game it is applied to. For zero-sum games with the sparse rewards of $\{-1,0,1\}$ at the end of the game, this is not a problem, but many games often feature dense rewards with hand-picked reward scales, causing a node's Q-value to span different magnitudes across different games. In this paper, we evaluate various strategies for adaptively choosing the UCT exploration constant $ฮป$, called $ฮป$-strategies, that are agnostic to the game's reward scale. These $ฮป$-strategies include those proposed in the literature as well as five new strategies. Given our experimental results, we recommend using one of our newly suggested $ฮป$-strategies, which is to choose $ฮป$ as $2 \cdot ฯƒ$ where $ฯƒ$ is the empirical standard deviation of all state-action pairs' Q-values of the search tree. This method outperforms existing $ฮป$-strategies across a wide range of tasks both in terms of a single parameter value and the peak performances obtained by optimizing all available parameters.


Revisiting Replanning from Scratch: Real-Time Incremental Planning with Fast Almost-Surely Asymptotically Optimal Planners

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Robots operating in changing environments either predict obstacle changes and/or plan quickly enough to react to them. Predictive approaches require a strong prior about the position and motion of obstacles. Reactive approaches require no assumptions about their environment but must replan quickly and find high-quality paths to navigate effectively. Reactive approaches often reuse information between queries to reduce planning cost. These techniques are conceptually sound but updating dense planning graphs when information changes can be computationally prohibitive. It can also require significant effort to detect the changes in some applications. This paper revisits the long-held assumption that reactive replanning requires updating existing plans. It shows that the incremental planning problem can alternatively be solved more efficiently as a series of independent problems using fast almost-surely asymptotically optimal (ASAO) planning algorithms. These ASAO algorithms quickly find an initial solution and converge towards an optimal solution which allows them to find consistent global plans in the presence of changing obstacles without requiring explicit plan reuse. This is demonstrated with simulated experiments where Effort Informed Trees (EIT*) finds shorter median solution paths than the tested reactive planning algorithms and is further validated using Asymptotically Optimal RRT-Connect (AORRTC) on a real-world planning problem on a robot arm.


Using Large Language Models for Abstraction of Planning Domains - Extended Version

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generating an abstraction of a dynamic domain that aligns with a given purpose remains a significant challenge given that the choice of such an abstraction can impact an agent's ability to plan, reason, and provide explanations effectively. We model the agent's concrete behaviors in PDDL and investigate the use of in-context learning with large language models (LLMs) for the generation of abstract PDDL domains and problem instances, given an abstraction objective specified in natural language. The benchmark examples we use are new and have not been part of the data any LLMs have been trained on. We consider three categories of abstractions: abstraction of choice of alternative concrete actions, abstraction of sequences of concrete actions, and abstraction of action/predicate parameters, as well as combinations of these. The generated abstract PDDL domains and problem instances are then checked by symbolic validation tools as well as human experts. Our experiments show that GPT -4o can generally synthesize useful planning domain abstractions in simple settings, although it is better at abstracting over actions than over the associated fluents.


CE-Nav: Flow-Guided Reinforcement Refinement for Cross-Embodiment Local Navigation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Generalizing local navigation policies across diverse robot morphologies is a critical challenge. Progress is often hindered by the need for costly and embodiment-specific data, the tight coupling of planning and control, and the "disastrous averaging" problem where deterministic models fail to capture multi-modal decisions (e.g., turning left or right). We introduce CE-Nav, a novel two-stage (IL-then-RL) framework that systematically decouples universal geometric reasoning from embodiment-specific dynamic adaptation. First, we train an embodiment-agnostic General Expert offline using imitation learning. This expert, a conditional normalizing flow model named VelFlow, learns the full distribution of kinematically-sound actions from a large-scale dataset generated by a classical planner, completely avoiding real robot data and resolving the multi-modality issue. Second, for a new robot, we freeze the expert and use it as a guiding prior to train a lightweight, Dynamics-Aware Refiner via online reinforcement learning. This refiner rapidly learns to compensate for the target robot's specific dynamics and controller imperfections with minimal environmental interaction. Extensive experiments on quadrupeds, bipeds, and quadrotors show that CE-Nav achieves state-of-the-art performance while drastically reducing adaptation cost. Successful real-world deployments further validate our approach as an efficient and scalable solution for building generalizable navigation systems. Code is available at https://github.com/amap-cvlab/CE-Nav.


Bridging Earth and Space: A Survey on HAPS for Non-Terrestrial Networks

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

HAPS are emerging as key enablers in the evolution of 6G wireless networks, bridging terrestrial and non-terrestrial infrastructures. Operating in the stratosphere, HAPS can provide wide-area coverage, low-latency, energy-efficient broadband communications with flexible deployment options for diverse applications. This survey delivers a comprehensive overview of HAPS use cases, technologies, and integration strategies within the 6G ecosystem. The roles of HAPS in extending connectivity to underserved regions, supporting dynamic backhauling, enabling massive IoT, and delivering reliable low-latency communications for autonomous and immersive services are discussed. The paper reviews state-of-the-art architectures for terrestrial and non-terrestrial network integration, highlights recent field trials. Furthermore, key enabling technologies such as channel modeling, AI-driven resource allocation, interference control, mobility management, and energy-efficient communications are examined. The paper also outlines open research challenges. By addressing existing gaps in the literature, this survey positions HAPS as a foundational component of globally integrated, resilient, and sustainable 6G networks.


NeSyPr: Neurosymbolic Proceduralization For Efficient Embodied Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We address the challenge of adopting language models (LMs) for embodied tasks in dynamic environments, where online access to large-scale inference engines or symbolic planners is constrained due to latency, connectivity, and resource limitations. To this end, we present NeSyPr, a novel embodied reasoning framework that compiles knowledge via neurosymbolic proceduralization, thereby equipping LM-based agents with structured, adaptive, and timely reasoning capabilities. In NeSyPr, task-specific plans are first explicitly generated by a symbolic tool leveraging its declarative knowledge. These plans are then transformed into composable procedural representations that encode the plans' implicit production rules, enabling the resulting composed procedures to be seamlessly integrated into the LM's inference process. This neurosymbolic proceduralization abstracts and generalizes multi-step symbolic structured path-finding and reasoning into single-step LM inference, akin to human knowledge compilation. It supports efficient test-time inference without relying on external symbolic guidance, making it well suited for deployment in latency-sensitive and resource-constrained physical systems. We evaluate NeSyPr on the embodied benchmarks PDDLGym, VirtualHome, and ALFWorld, demonstrating its efficient reasoning capabilities over large-scale reasoning models and a symbolic planner, while using more compact LMs.