Recent years have seen embodied visual navigation advance in two distinct directions: (i) in equipping the AI agent to follow natural language instructions, and (ii) in making the navigable world multimodal, e.g., audio-visual navigation. However, the real world is not only multimodal, but also often complex, and thus in spite of these advances, agents still need to understand the uncertainty in their actions and seek instructions to navigate.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advanced reasoning skills, enabling robots to comprehend natural language instructions and strategically plan high-level actions through proper grounding. However, LLM hallucination may result in robots confidently executing plans that are misaligned with user goals or even unsafe in critical scenarios. Additionally, inherent ambiguity in natural language instructions can introduce uncertainty into the LLM's reasoning and planning. We propose introspective planning, a systematic approach that guides LLMs to refine their own uncertainty in alignment with inherent task ambiguity. Our approach constructs a knowledge base containing introspective reasoning examples as post-hoc rationalizations of human-selected safe and compliant plans, which are retrieved during deployment. Evaluations on three tasks, including a new safe mobile manipulation benchmark, indicate that introspection substantially improves both compliance and safety over state-of-the-art LLM-based planning methods. Additionally, we empirically show that introspective planning, in combination with conformal prediction, achieves tighter confidence bounds, maintaining statistical success guarantees while minimizing unnecessary user clarification requests.

For completeness, in the following we include a datasheet based on the format of [1]. For what purpose was the dataset created? Was there a specific task in mind? Who created the dataset (e.g., which team, research group) and on behalf of which entity What do the instances that comprise the dataset represent (e.g., documents, photos, people, The dataset contains episodes of human demonstrations for mobile device control. How many instances are there in total (of each type, if appropriate)?

We explore representing complex actions as natural language instructions.

Natural language-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) enables agents to follow human instructions.

Similartoaudio-visual navigationtasks,thegoalofourembodied agentistolocalize anaudioeventvia navigating the 3D visual world; however, the agent may also seek help from a human (oracle), where the assistance is provided in free-form natural language.