REVIEW 2 major objections 4 minor 34 references
A trained planner turns terse household instructions into symbolic subgoals and reaches 89% success on abstract tasks, sharply ahead of prior methods.
Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →
T0 review · deepseek-v4-flash
2026-08-04 06:00 UTC pith:53N4BT7I
load-bearing objection Solid new training recipe for LLM+PDDL, but the headline success rates are computed with the same LLM judge that supplies the training reward, so the numbers are not trustworthy as reported. the 2 major comments →
Any House Any Task: Scalable Long-Horizon Planning for Abstract Human Tasks
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
Core claim
AHAT establishes that a language model trained to emit PDDL subgoals, rather than low-level actions, can plan household tasks from terse instructions with high success. The core discovery is that reinforcement learning benefits materially from externally fixing the intermediate decomposition trace while letting the policy propose the subgoals: TGPO's two-pass design yields 89.0% success on abstract tasks versus 20.1% for the strongest prompting baseline. The paper further reports that performance degrades only modestly as scene graphs grow, plans lengthen, instructions become more abstract, and constraints become denser, whereas baselines degrade substantially along one or more of these axes
What carries the argument
The central object is TGPO, a two-pass reinforcement learning algorithm built on GRPO. In the first pass, the policy generates candidate decomposition traces and PDDL subgoals; failed candidates are sent to an external trace improver that rewrites the natural-language decomposition. In the second pass, the corrected trace is forced into the rollout via token-level constrained sampling while the policy continues to generate subgoals autoregressively. Group-relative advantages are computed over the augmented candidate group. This gives the policy credit for producing subgoals that the improved trace makes solvable, while preserving on-policy optimization. The second key piece is the PDDL subgo
Load-bearing premise
The reported success rates are scored by the same LLM reviewer that provides the reward during training; if that reviewer is biased toward the policy's style or overly lenient, the numbers are not a reliable measure of how well a real user's request is fulfilled.
What would settle it
Run AHAT on a held-out set of abstract instructions and have human annotators judge whether each generated plan would satisfy the request, then compare those human labels with the reviewer model's scores; a large mismatch would indicate that the reported success rates reflect reviewer leniency rather than genuine task understanding.
If this is right
- If AHAT's central claim holds, household robots can handle natural, terse instructions by combining a small trained LLM with a symbolic planner, reducing the need for large end-to-end action-generating models.
- Robustness to plan lengths over 30 actions and scene graphs of roughly 150 nodes suggests the decompose-then-solve design avoids the error accumulation that plagues monolithic action-sequence generation.
- Because the policy only outputs subgoals, the same framework could transfer to new PDDL domains with additional domain-specific annotations and retraining.
- TGPO provides a template for injecting external feedback into the reasoning traces of any LLM whose outputs are evaluated by a verifier, which may extend beyond planning to other structured reasoning tasks.
Where Pith is reading between the lines
- The reported success rates rely on the same LLM reviewer that provides training rewards; if that reviewer is lenient toward the policy's output style, the absolute numbers may overstate real-world performance, and an independent human evaluation would be needed to confirm the gains.
- The method assumes a closed, predefined PDDL domain and full observability, as the paper acknowledges; a natural extension is to learn domain constraints from raw sensor data, which could open partially observable settings.
- TGPO's trace correction could be applied beyond planning: any task where an intermediate chain-of-thought can be improved by an external checker (for example, proof steps or code reasoning) might benefit from the same constrained-sampling RL loop.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes AHAT, a long-horizon household task planner built on a Qwen2.5-7B LLM that first generates a natural-language decomposition trace and then grounds each subtask into PDDL subgoals, which are solved by an off-the-shelf PDDL planner. The model is trained with SFT on a large synthetic dataset and then with TGPO, an extension of GRPO that uses an external 'trace improver' to correct failed decomposition traces and regenerates subgoals under the corrected trace. The authors claim large gains over prompting-based, general-purpose LLM, and learning-based baselines on a held-out synthetic benchmark, human-authored tasks, and two public benchmarks (PARTNR and Behavior-1K), and report scalability in environment size, plan length, abstractness, and constraints. The paper's central quantitative claims rest on an evaluation metric SR = (1/N) Σ I_feas·R_comp, where R_comp is produced by the same Qwen3-235B 'reviewer' that supplies the completion reward in TGPO training. This identity raises serious concerns about the validity of the reported success-rate figures.
Significance. If the reported numbers are trustworthy, the paper would be a significant advance: AHAT's decompose-then-solve architecture cleanly combines LLM-based intention understanding with symbolic planning, and TGPO is an interesting RL variant that incorporates external trace correction. The 50k-task dataset with persona-driven instruction diversity is a valuable resource, and the paper is transparent about its PDDL feasibility checking and planning pipeline, which are machine-checkable and reproducible in principle. However, the evaluation's dependence on the same judge used for training is a major threat to the internal validity of all reported gains. The paper's strengths in method design and dataset construction cannot be fully credited until an independent success criterion—human judgments or simulator-based ground truth—is provided.
major comments (2)
- [§V-A, §VI-A2] The training reward (§V-A) and evaluation metric (§VI-A2) are both R(o)=I_feas·R_comp with the same Qwen3-235B 'reviewer' producing R_comp. Since TGPO optimizes the policy against this judge and the SFT data are filtered/reviewed by the same model (§IV-B), the reported success rate is a measure of fit to this judge, not of task completion. Feasibility is objective, but completion dominates on abstract tasks (Table I: 89.0% vs 20.1% baseline). No human or simulator ground truth is reported for any benchmark. This affects every claimed gain (Tables I–IV, Fig. 3). The authors should add human-rated subsets or use the official success criteria of PARTNR/Behavior-1K.
- [§VI-A1] The 'Human Tasks' test set is not human-evaluated: the instructions are authored by humans, but the completion score is calculated with the same Qwen3-235B reviewer used in training. The 82.2% success rate therefore reflects the reviewer's opinion, not human satisfaction. This label is misleading and should be changed (e.g., to 'human-authored tasks'), and a genuine human evaluation should be provided to support the claim of performance on real user tasks.
minor comments (4)
- [Table III] The name 'E2E-TRPO' appears in Table III, while the text and Fig. 3 refer to 'E2E-TGPO'. Please fix this inconsistency.
- [§V-B] The trace improver model is not identified. Please state which model is used and whether it is the same as the reviewer, as this affects the interpretation of the training signal.
- [§VI-A2] The paper does not report how the baseline methods are evaluated with respect to the reviewer; e.g., whether the same PDDL problem construction and reviewer prompt are used for SayPlan and DELTA. Please provide details for reproducibility.
- [Fig. 3] The x-axis labels 'Task Abstractness' and 'Constraint Complexity' are vague; please define the precise metrics used to compute these axes.
Circularity Check
Reported success rate is the TGPO reward itself: the same Qwen3-235B reviewer supplies R_comp in both the training reward and the evaluation metric, making the completion component of every headline gain self-referential.
specific steps
-
self definitional
[Section V-A (Reward definition) and Section VI-A2 (Evaluation Metrics)]
"For task completion, we employ an auxiliary LLM as a reviewer to assess whether the resulting action sequence fulfills the instruction. Concretely, we use QWEN3-235B [29] to review the solver-composed plan by summarizing and critiquing it w.r.t. q, and output a discrete label c∈{Bad,Normal,Good}, which we map to a scalar completion score R_comp(o)∈{0,α,1} with α=0.5. ... We define the final reward by combining the above scores: R(o)=I_feas(o)·R_comp(o). ... SR = 1/N Σ I_feas(o_i)·R_comp(o_i)."
The completion term R_comp is the same Qwen3-235B judgment in both the TGPO training reward and the reported success-rate metric. TGPO explicitly optimizes the policy against R(o)=I_feas(o)·R_comp(o), while the paper reports success as the average of the same product with the same reviewer. The policy is therefore trained to maximize the exact scalar later presented as 'success.' Any systematic leniency or stylistic preference of Qwen3-235B toward AHAT's outputs inflates every reported success number, including public-benchmark results in Table II. Only the PDDL feasibility factor is objective; the completion half of the success rate is self-referential. This is a partial circularity because I_feas is independently verified by the symbolic planner.
full rationale
The derivation chain of AHAT is mostly self-contained: subgoal feasibility is objectively checked by a PDDL solver, the SFT/RL training loop is specified, and no load-bearing argument reduces to a self-citation. The one genuine circular step is the identity between the optimization target and the evaluation metric. In Section V-A, the TGPO reward is R(o)=I_feas(o)·R_comp(o), with R_comp produced by QWEN3-235B as the reviewer; in Section VI-A2, the reported success rate is SR=(1/N)Σ I_feas(o_i)·R_comp(o_i), using the same R_comp function. The policy is therefore explicitly trained to maximize the same scalar that is later reported as 'success.' Because the reviewer also supplies trace-improvement feedback and filters SFT annotations, AHAT is shaped to satisfy this specific judge's preferences. Consequently, the completion half of the success metric is circular: any systematic leniency or output-style bias in Qwen3-235B directly inflates all reported gains, including the public-benchmark numbers in Table II, which use the same proxy rather than simulator or human ground truth. The feasibility factor is objective, which is why this is partial rather than total circularity, and the method itself may still be sound. No other enumerated circularity pattern is present.
Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger
free parameters (5)
- alpha (completion reward weight) =
0.5
- tau_fail (failure threshold) =
not specified
- GRPO clipping/KL coefficients epsilon, beta =
not specified
- candidate group size N / N' =
not specified
- SFT epochs before RL =
3
axioms (4)
- domain assumption Qwen3-235B reviewer judgements are a valid proxy for human task completion
- domain assumption Scene graphs and fixed PDDL domain provide a complete, closed-world model of the environment
- domain assumption LLM-generated synthetic instructions with persona prompts are representative of real human instructions
- domain assumption SFT annotations from GPT-5 Hi-PDDL with retry and scene-repair are high-quality supervision
read the original abstract
Open world language conditioned task planning is crucial for robots operating in large-scale household environments. While many recent works attempt to address this problem using Large Language Models (LLMs) via prompting or training, a key challenge remains scalability. Performance often degrades rapidly with increasing environment size, plan length, instruction ambiguity, and constraint complexity. In this work, we propose Any House Any Task (AHAT), a household task planner optimized for long-horizon planning in large environments given ambiguous human instructions. At its core, AHAT utilizes an LLM trained to map task instructions and textual scene graphs into grounded subgoals defined in the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). These subgoals are subsequently solved to generate feasible and optimal long-horizon plans through explicit symbolic reasoning. To enhance the model's ability to decompose complex and ambiguous intentions, we introduce TGPO, a novel reinforcement learning algorithm that integrates external correction of intermediate reasoning traces into Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments demonstrate that AHAT achieves significant performance gains over state-of-the-art prompting, planning, and learning methods, particularly in human-style household tasks characterized by brief instructions but requiring complex execution plans.
Figures
Reference graph
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