ViPlan: A Benchmark for Visual Planning with Symbolic Predicates and Vision-Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Merler, Matteo, Dainese, Nicola, Alakuijala, Minttu, Bonetta, Giovanni, Ferrazzi, Pietro, Tian, Yu, Magnini, Bernardo, Marttinen, Pekka
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Merler, Matteo
Dainese, Nicola
Alakuijala, Minttu
Bonetta, Giovanni
Ferrazzi, Pietro
Tian, Yu
Magnini, Bernardo
Marttinen, Pekka
author_facet Merler, Matteo
Dainese, Nicola
Alakuijala, Minttu
Bonetta, Giovanni
Ferrazzi, Pietro
Tian, Yu
Magnini, Bernardo
Marttinen, Pekka
contents Integrating Large Language Models with symbolic planners is a promising direction for obtaining verifiable and grounded plans, with recent work extending this idea to visual domains using Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, a rigorous comparison with methods that plan directly with VLMs is missing, due to a lack of visual benchmarks that support symbolic planning. We present ViPlan, the first open-source benchmark for comparing VLM-grounded symbolic approaches (VLM-as-grounder) with direct VLM planning methods (VLM-as-planner). ViPlan introduces a series of increasingly challenging tasks in two visual domains: a visual variant of the classic Blocksworld planning problem and a simulated household robotics environment. We find VLM-as-grounder methods to outperform direct VLM planning in Blocksworld (solving 46% of the tasks against 9%), where image grounding is both crucial and accurate. However, in the household robotics tasks, where linguistic knowledge helps, VLM-as-planner methods are greatly superior to VLM-as-grounder approaches (solving 34% of the tasks against 5%), which are hindered by partial observability. Thus, ViPlan domains capture fundamental shortcomings of both planning approaches, which we further diagnose with a qualitative failure analysis. Finally, across methods, we observe no consistent benefit from Chain-of-Thought prompting, suggesting persistent limitations in current VLMs' visual reasoning abilities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_13180
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ViPlan: A Benchmark for Visual Planning with Symbolic Predicates and Vision-Language Models
Merler, Matteo
Dainese, Nicola
Alakuijala, Minttu
Bonetta, Giovanni
Ferrazzi, Pietro
Tian, Yu
Magnini, Bernardo
Marttinen, Pekka
Artificial Intelligence
Integrating Large Language Models with symbolic planners is a promising direction for obtaining verifiable and grounded plans, with recent work extending this idea to visual domains using Vision-Language Models (VLMs). However, a rigorous comparison with methods that plan directly with VLMs is missing, due to a lack of visual benchmarks that support symbolic planning. We present ViPlan, the first open-source benchmark for comparing VLM-grounded symbolic approaches (VLM-as-grounder) with direct VLM planning methods (VLM-as-planner). ViPlan introduces a series of increasingly challenging tasks in two visual domains: a visual variant of the classic Blocksworld planning problem and a simulated household robotics environment. We find VLM-as-grounder methods to outperform direct VLM planning in Blocksworld (solving 46% of the tasks against 9%), where image grounding is both crucial and accurate. However, in the household robotics tasks, where linguistic knowledge helps, VLM-as-planner methods are greatly superior to VLM-as-grounder approaches (solving 34% of the tasks against 5%), which are hindered by partial observability. Thus, ViPlan domains capture fundamental shortcomings of both planning approaches, which we further diagnose with a qualitative failure analysis. Finally, across methods, we observe no consistent benefit from Chain-of-Thought prompting, suggesting persistent limitations in current VLMs' visual reasoning abilities.
title ViPlan: A Benchmark for Visual Planning with Symbolic Predicates and Vision-Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13180