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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pham, Quang P. M., Nguyen, Khoi T. N., Doan, Nhi H., Pham, Cuong A., Sun, Qinbo, Qi, Weimin, Inui, Kentaro, Song, Dezhen
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00831
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author Pham, Quang P. M.
Nguyen, Khoi T. N.
Doan, Nhi H.
Pham, Cuong A.
Sun, Qinbo
Qi, Weimin
Inui, Kentaro
Song, Dezhen
author_facet Pham, Quang P. M.
Nguyen, Khoi T. N.
Doan, Nhi H.
Pham, Cuong A.
Sun, Qinbo
Qi, Weimin
Inui, Kentaro
Song, Dezhen
contents Efficient path planning in robotics, particularly within large-scale, complex environments, remains a significant hurdle. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, their high computational cost and limited adaptability hinder real-time deployment on edge devices. We present SmallPlan - a novel framework leveraging LLMs as teacher models to train lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) for high-level path planning tasks. In SmallPlan, the SLMs provide optimal action sequences to navigate across scene graphs that compactly represent full-scaled 3D scenes. The SLMs are trained in a simulation-powered, interleaved manner with LLM-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). This strategy not only enables SLMs to successfully complete navigation tasks but also makes them aware of important factors like distance travel, providing more efficient path planning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the fine-tuned SLMs perform competitively with larger models like GPT-4o on sequential path planning, without suffering from hallucination and overfitting. SmallPlan is resource-efficient, making it well-suited for edge-device deployment and advancing practical autonomous robotics. Our source code is available here: https://github.com/quangpham2006/SmallPlan
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00831
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SmallPlan: Leverage Small Language Models for Sequential Path Planning with Simulation-Powered, LLM-Guided Distillation
Pham, Quang P. M.
Nguyen, Khoi T. N.
Doan, Nhi H.
Pham, Cuong A.
Sun, Qinbo
Qi, Weimin
Inui, Kentaro
Song, Dezhen
Robotics
Computation and Language
Efficient path planning in robotics, particularly within large-scale, complex environments, remains a significant hurdle. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, their high computational cost and limited adaptability hinder real-time deployment on edge devices. We present SmallPlan - a novel framework leveraging LLMs as teacher models to train lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) for high-level path planning tasks. In SmallPlan, the SLMs provide optimal action sequences to navigate across scene graphs that compactly represent full-scaled 3D scenes. The SLMs are trained in a simulation-powered, interleaved manner with LLM-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). This strategy not only enables SLMs to successfully complete navigation tasks but also makes them aware of important factors like distance travel, providing more efficient path planning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the fine-tuned SLMs perform competitively with larger models like GPT-4o on sequential path planning, without suffering from hallucination and overfitting. SmallPlan is resource-efficient, making it well-suited for edge-device deployment and advancing practical autonomous robotics. Our source code is available here: https://github.com/quangpham2006/SmallPlan
title SmallPlan: Leverage Small Language Models for Sequential Path Planning with Simulation-Powered, LLM-Guided Distillation
topic Robotics
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00831