Few-Shot Neuro-Symbolic Imitation Learning for Long-Horizon Planning and Acting

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lorang, Pierrick, Lu, Hong, Huemer, Johannes, Zips, Patrik, Scheutz, Matthias
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866909759993544704
author Lorang, Pierrick
Lu, Hong
Huemer, Johannes
Zips, Patrik
Scheutz, Matthias
author_facet Lorang, Pierrick
Lu, Hong
Huemer, Johannes
Zips, Patrik
Scheutz, Matthias
contents Imitation learning enables intelligent systems to acquire complex behaviors with minimal supervision. However, existing methods often focus on short-horizon skills, require large datasets, and struggle to solve long-horizon tasks or generalize across task variations and distribution shifts. We propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework that jointly learns continuous control policies and symbolic domain abstractions from a few skill demonstrations. Our method abstracts high-level task structures into a graph, discovers symbolic rules via an Answer Set Programming solver, and trains low-level controllers using diffusion policy imitation learning. A high-level oracle filters task-relevant information to focus each controller on a minimal observation and action space. Our graph-based neuro-symbolic framework enables capturing complex state transitions, including non-spatial and temporal relations, that data-driven learning or clustering techniques often fail to discover in limited demonstration datasets. We validate our approach in six domains that involve four robotic arms, Stacking, Kitchen, Assembly, and Towers of Hanoi environments, and a distinct Automated Forklift domain with two environments. The results demonstrate high data efficiency with as few as five skill demonstrations, strong zero- and few-shot generalizations, and interpretable decision making.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_21501
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Few-Shot Neuro-Symbolic Imitation Learning for Long-Horizon Planning and Acting
Lorang, Pierrick
Lu, Hong
Huemer, Johannes
Zips, Patrik
Scheutz, Matthias
Robotics
Imitation learning enables intelligent systems to acquire complex behaviors with minimal supervision. However, existing methods often focus on short-horizon skills, require large datasets, and struggle to solve long-horizon tasks or generalize across task variations and distribution shifts. We propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework that jointly learns continuous control policies and symbolic domain abstractions from a few skill demonstrations. Our method abstracts high-level task structures into a graph, discovers symbolic rules via an Answer Set Programming solver, and trains low-level controllers using diffusion policy imitation learning. A high-level oracle filters task-relevant information to focus each controller on a minimal observation and action space. Our graph-based neuro-symbolic framework enables capturing complex state transitions, including non-spatial and temporal relations, that data-driven learning or clustering techniques often fail to discover in limited demonstration datasets. We validate our approach in six domains that involve four robotic arms, Stacking, Kitchen, Assembly, and Towers of Hanoi environments, and a distinct Automated Forklift domain with two environments. The results demonstrate high data efficiency with as few as five skill demonstrations, strong zero- and few-shot generalizations, and interpretable decision making.
title Few-Shot Neuro-Symbolic Imitation Learning for Long-Horizon Planning and Acting
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.21501