Daily Papers

Recent video generation approaches increasingly rely on planning intermediate control signals such as object trajectories to improve temporal coherence and motion fidelity. However, these methods mostly employ single-shot plans that are typically limited to simple motions, or iterative refinement which requires multiple calls to the video generator, incuring high computational cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose SketchVerify, a training-free, sketch-verification-based planning framework that improves motion planning quality with more dynamically coherent trajectories (i.e., physically plausible and instruction-consistent motions) prior to full video generation by introducing a test-time sampling and verification loop. Given a prompt and a reference image, our method predicts multiple candidate motion plans and ranks them using a vision-language verifier that jointly evaluates semantic alignment with the instruction and physical plausibility. To efficiently score candidate motion plans, we render each trajectory as a lightweight video sketch by compositing objects over a static background, which bypasses the need for expensive, repeated diffusion-based synthesis while achieving comparable performance. We iteratively refine the motion plan until a satisfactory one is identified, which is then passed to the trajectory-conditioned generator for final synthesis. Experiments on WorldModelBench and PhyWorldBench demonstrate that our method significantly improves motion quality, physical realism, and long-term consistency compared to competitive baselines while being substantially more efficient. Our ablation study further shows that scaling up the number of trajectory candidates consistently enhances overall performance.

We present a sketch-based CAD modeling system, where users create objects incrementally by sketching the desired shape edits, which our system automatically translates to CAD operations. Our approach is motivated by the close similarities between the steps industrial designers follow to draw 3D shapes, and the operations CAD modeling systems offer to create similar shapes. To overcome the strong ambiguity with parsing 2D sketches, we observe that in a sketching sequence, each step makes sense and can be interpreted in the context of what has been drawn before. In our system, this context corresponds to a partial CAD model, inferred in the previous steps, which we feed along with the input sketch to a deep neural network in charge of interpreting how the model should be modified by that sketch. Our deep network architecture then recognizes the intended CAD operation and segments the sketch accordingly, such that a subsequent optimization estimates the parameters of the operation that best fit the segmented sketch strokes. Since there exists no datasets of paired sketching and CAD modeling sequences, we train our system by generating synthetic sequences of CAD operations that we render as line drawings. We present a proof of concept realization of our algorithm supporting four frequently used CAD operations. Using our system, participants are able to quickly model a large and diverse set of objects, demonstrating Sketch2CAD to be an alternate way of interacting with current CAD modeling systems.

Despite the empirical success of extensive, step-by-step reasoning in large multimodal models, long reasoning processes inevitably incur substantial computational overhead, i.e., in terms of higher token costs and increased response time, which undermines inference efficiency. In contrast, humans often employ sketch-style reasoning: a concise, goal-directed cognitive process that prioritizes salient information and enables efficient problem-solving. Inspired by this cognitive efficiency, we propose SketchThinker-R1, which incentivizes sketch-style reasoning ability in large multimodal models. Our method consists of three primary stages. In the Sketch-Mode Cold Start stage, we convert standard long reasoning process into sketch-style reasoning and finetune base multimodal model, instilling initial sketch-style reasoning capability. Next, we train SketchJudge Reward Model, which explicitly evaluates thinking process of model and assigns higher scores to sketch-style reasoning. Finally, we conduct Sketch-Thinking Reinforcement Learning under supervision of SketchJudge to further generalize sketch-style reasoning ability. Experimental evaluation on four benchmarks reveals that our SketchThinker-R1 achieves over 64% reduction in reasoning token cost without compromising final answer accuracy. Qualitative analysis further shows that sketch-style reasoning focuses more on key cues during problem solving.

A typical human strategy for giving navigation guidance is to sketch route maps based on the environmental layout. Inspired by this, we introduce Sketch map-based visual Navigation (SkeNa), an embodied navigation task in which an agent must reach a goal in an unseen environment using only a hand-drawn sketch map as guidance. To support research for SkeNa, we present a large-scale dataset named SoR, comprising 54k trajectory and sketch map pairs across 71 indoor scenes. In SoR, we introduce two navigation validation sets with varying levels of abstraction in hand-drawn sketches, categorized based on their preservation of spatial scales in the environment, to facilitate future research. To construct SoR, we develop an automated sketch-generation pipeline that efficiently converts floor plans into hand-drawn representations. To solve SkeNa, we propose SkeNavigator, a navigation framework that aligns visual observations with hand-drawn maps to estimate navigation targets. It employs a Ray-based Map Descriptor (RMD) to enhance sketch map valid feature representation using equidistant sampling points and boundary distances. To improve alignment with visual observations, a Dual-Map Aligned Goal Predictor (DAGP) leverages the correspondence between sketch map features and on-site constructed exploration map features to predict goal position and guide navigation. SkeNavigator outperforms prior floor plan navigation methods by a large margin, improving SPL on the high-abstract validation set by 105% relatively. Our code and dataset will be released.

Natural language and images are commonly used as goal representations in goal-conditioned imitation learning (IL). However, natural language can be ambiguous and images can be over-specified. In this work, we propose hand-drawn sketches as a modality for goal specification in visual imitation learning. Sketches are easy for users to provide on the fly like language, but similar to images they can also help a downstream policy to be spatially-aware and even go beyond images to disambiguate task-relevant from task-irrelevant objects. We present RT-Sketch, a goal-conditioned policy for manipulation that takes a hand-drawn sketch of the desired scene as input, and outputs actions. We train RT-Sketch on a dataset of paired trajectories and corresponding synthetically generated goal sketches. We evaluate this approach on six manipulation skills involving tabletop object rearrangements on an articulated countertop. Experimentally we find that RT-Sketch is able to perform on a similar level to image or language-conditioned agents in straightforward settings, while achieving greater robustness when language goals are ambiguous or visual distractors are present. Additionally, we show that RT-Sketch has the capacity to interpret and act upon sketches with varied levels of specificity, ranging from minimal line drawings to detailed, colored drawings. For supplementary material and videos, please refer to our website: http://rt-sketch.github.io.

Recent agent frameworks and inference-time algorithms often struggle with complex planning problems due to limitations in verifying generated plans or reasoning and varying complexity of instances within a single task. Many existing methods for these tasks either perform task-level verification without considering constraints or apply inference-time algorithms without adapting to instance-level complexity. To address these limitations, we propose PlanGEN, a model-agnostic and easily scalable agent framework with three key components: constraint, verification, and selection agents. Specifically, our approach proposes constraint-guided iterative verification to enhance performance of inference-time algorithms--Best of N, Tree-of-Thought, and REBASE. In PlanGEN framework, the selection agent optimizes algorithm choice based on instance complexity, ensuring better adaptability to complex planning problems. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over the strongest baseline across multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on NATURAL PLAN (sim8%uparrow), OlympiadBench (sim4%uparrow), DocFinQA (sim7%uparrow), and GPQA (sim1%uparrow). Our key finding highlights that constraint-guided iterative verification improves inference-time algorithms, and adaptive selection further boosts performance on complex planning and reasoning problems.

Hand-drawn sketches are a natural and efficient medium for capturing and conveying ideas. Despite significant advancements in controllable natural image generation, translating freehand sketches into structured, machine-readable diagrams remains a labor-intensive and predominantly manual task. The primary challenge stems from the inherent ambiguity of sketches, which lack the structural constraints and semantic precision required for automated diagram generation. To address this challenge, we introduce SketchAgent, a multi-agent system designed to automate the transformation of hand-drawn sketches into structured diagrams. SketchAgent integrates sketch recognition, symbolic reasoning, and iterative validation to produce semantically coherent and structurally accurate diagrams, significantly reducing the need for manual effort. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approach, we propose the Sketch2Diagram Benchmark, a comprehensive dataset and evaluation framework encompassing eight diverse diagram categories, such as flowcharts, directed graphs, and model architectures. The dataset comprises over 6,000 high-quality examples with token-level annotations, standardized preprocessing, and rigorous quality control. By streamlining the diagram generation process, SketchAgent holds great promise for applications in design, education, and engineering, while offering a significant step toward bridging the gap between intuitive sketching and machine-readable diagram generation. The benchmark is released at https://huggingface.co/datasets/DiagramAgent/Sketch2Diagram-Benchmark.

Sketching in 3D space enables expressive reasoning about shape, structure, and spatial relationships, yet generating 3D sketches through natural language remains a major challenge. In this work, we introduce 3DrawAgent, a training-free, language-driven framework for 3D sketch generation that leverages large language models (LLMs) to sequentially draw 3D Bezier curves under geometric feedback. Unlike prior 2D sketch agents, our method introduces a relative experience optimization strategy that adapts the recently proposed Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO) paradigm. Instead of relying on explicit ground-truth supervision, we construct pairwise comparisons among generated sketches, with each pair consisting of a relatively better and a worse result based on CLIP-based perceptual rewards and LLM-based fine-grained qualitative assessment. These experiences are then used to iteratively refine the prior knowledge of 3D drawing, enabling black-box reinforcement of the model's 3D awareness. This design allows our model to self-improve its spatial understanding and drawing quality without parameter updates. Experiments show that 3DrawAgent can generate complex and coherent 3D Bezier sketches from diverse textual prompts, exhibit emergent geometric reasoning, and generalize to novel shapes, establishing a new paradigm for advancing the field of training-free 3D sketch intelligence.

This paper unravels the potential of sketches for diffusion models, addressing the deceptive promise of direct sketch control in generative AI. We importantly democratise the process, enabling amateur sketches to generate precise images, living up to the commitment of "what you sketch is what you get". A pilot study underscores the necessity, revealing that deformities in existing models stem from spatial-conditioning. To rectify this, we propose an abstraction-aware framework, utilising a sketch adapter, adaptive time-step sampling, and discriminative guidance from a pre-trained fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval model, working synergistically to reinforce fine-grained sketch-photo association. Our approach operates seamlessly during inference without the need for textual prompts; a simple, rough sketch akin to what you and I can create suffices! We welcome everyone to examine results presented in the paper and its supplementary. Contributions include democratising sketch control, introducing an abstraction-aware framework, and leveraging discriminative guidance, validated through extensive experiments.

The formalization of existing mathematical proofs is a notoriously difficult process. Despite decades of research on automation and proof assistants, writing formal proofs remains arduous and only accessible to a few experts. While previous studies to automate formalization focused on powerful search algorithms, no attempts were made to take advantage of available informal proofs. In this work, we introduce Draft, Sketch, and Prove (DSP), a method that maps informal proofs to formal proof sketches, and uses the sketches to guide an automated prover by directing its search to easier sub-problems. We investigate two relevant setups where informal proofs are either written by humans or generated by a language model. Our experiments and ablation studies show that large language models are able to produce well-structured formal sketches that follow the same reasoning steps as the informal proofs. Guiding an automated prover with these sketches enhances its performance from 20.9% to 39.3% on a collection of mathematical competition problems.

This work presents DAVINCI, a unified architecture for single-stage Computer-Aided Design (CAD) sketch parameterization and constraint inference directly from raster sketch images. By jointly learning both outputs, DAVINCI minimizes error accumulation and enhances the performance of constrained CAD sketch inference. Notably, DAVINCI achieves state-of-the-art results on the large-scale SketchGraphs dataset, demonstrating effectiveness on both precise and hand-drawn raster CAD sketches. To reduce DAVINCI's reliance on large-scale annotated datasets, we explore the efficacy of CAD sketch augmentations. We introduce Constraint-Preserving Transformations (CPTs), i.e. random permutations of the parametric primitives of a CAD sketch that preserve its constraints. This data augmentation strategy allows DAVINCI to achieve reasonable performance when trained with only 0.1% of the SketchGraphs dataset. Furthermore, this work contributes a new version of SketchGraphs, augmented with CPTs. The newly introduced CPTSketchGraphs dataset includes 80 million CPT-augmented sketches, thus providing a rich resource for future research in the CAD sketch domain.

Humans draw to facilitate reasoning: we draw auxiliary lines when solving geometry problems; we mark and circle when reasoning on maps; we use sketches to amplify our ideas and relieve our limited-capacity working memory. However, such actions are missing in current multimodal language models (LMs). Current chain-of-thought and tool-use paradigms only use text as intermediate reasoning steps. In this work, we introduce Sketchpad, a framework that gives multimodal LMs a visual sketchpad and tools to draw on the sketchpad. The LM conducts planning and reasoning according to the visual artifacts it has drawn. Different from prior work, which uses text-to-image models to enable LMs to draw, Sketchpad enables LMs to draw with lines, boxes, marks, etc., which is closer to human sketching and better facilitates reasoning. Sketchpad can also use specialist vision models during the sketching process (e.g., draw bounding boxes with object detection models, draw masks with segmentation models), to further enhance visual perception and reasoning. We experiment with a wide range of math tasks (including geometry, functions, graphs, and chess) and complex visual reasoning tasks. Sketchpad substantially improves performance on all tasks over strong base models with no sketching, yielding an average gain of 12.7% on math tasks, and 8.6% on vision tasks. GPT-4o with Sketchpad sets a new state of the art on all tasks, including V*Bench (80.3%), BLINK spatial reasoning (83.9%), and visual correspondence (80.8%). All codes and data are in https://visualsketchpad.github.io/.

Articulation modeling aims to infer movable parts and their motion parameters for a 3D object, enabling interactive animation, simulation, and shape editing. In this paper, we present Sketch2Arti, the first sketch-based articulation modeling system for CAD objects. Our key observation is that designers naturally communicate articulation intent through lightweight sketches (e.g., arrows and strokes) that indicate how parts should move, yet translating such sketches into articulated 3D models remains largely manual. Sketch2Arti bridges this gap by enabling users to specify articulation through simple 2D sketches drawn from a chosen viewpoint. Given a CAD model and user sketches, our approach automatically discovers the corresponding movable parts and predicts their motion parameters, allowing iterative modeling of multiple articulations on complex objects with fine-grained control. Importantly, Sketch2Arti is trained in a category-agnostic manner without requiring object category information, leading to strong generalization to diverse objects beyond existing articulation datasets. Moreover, for shell models lacking interior structures, Sketch2Arti supports controllable internal completion guided by user sketches, generating plausible internal components consistent with the existing geometry and predicted motion constraints. Comprehensive experiments and user evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness, controllability, and generalization of Sketch2Arti. The code, dataset, and the prototype system are at https://arlo-yang.github.io/Sketch2Arti.

Many recent prompting strategies for large language models (LLMs) query the model multiple times sequentially -- first to produce intermediate results and then the final answer. However, using these methods, both decoder and model are unaware of potential follow-up prompts, leading to disconnected and undesirably wordy intermediate responses. In this work, we address this issue by proposing prompt sketching, a new prompting paradigm in which an LLM does not only respond by completing a prompt, but by predicting values for multiple variables in a template. This way, sketching grants users more control over the generation process, e.g., by providing a reasoning framework via intermediate instructions, leading to better overall results. The key idea enabling sketching with existing, autoregressive models is to adapt the decoding procedure to also score follow-up instructions during text generation, thus optimizing overall template likelihood in inference. Our experiments show that in a zero-shot setting, prompt sketching outperforms existing, sequential prompting schemes such as direct asking or chain-of-thought on 7 out of 8 LLM benchmarking tasks, including state tracking, arithmetic reasoning, and general question answering. To facilitate future use, we release a number of generic, yet effective sketches applicable to many tasks, and an open source library called dclib, powering our sketch-aware decoders.

Direct prompt-based editing often fails on complex transformations because vague and subjective prompts often require nuanced understanding of what should be changed in the image. Our core intuition is that leveraging compositional image editing tools rather than direct prompting profits from structured agent-level planning with explicit reasoning, leading to better results. This structured planning framework enables efficient offline RL post-training on quality-scored trajectories to improve performance. We present a tool-based agentic RL post-training framework that addresses this through structured planning with chain-of-thought reasoning. Our key contributions include: (1) A tool-based agentic planning methodology that combines a compositional library of orthogonal primitive transformations, structured context representation, and explicit per-step reasoning to decompose complex styling into interpretable tool sequences. (2) A synthetic data generation pipeline producing three large-scale datasets (each sim10K trajectories) with reasoning chains, plans, and quality scores, as no existing datasets provide such supervision. Our datasets and code are publicly available at the HuggingFace repository. (3) Offline RL training methods for learning planners with reasoning as our core algorithmic contributions, which consistently improve over the Edit-Only baseline in visual quality and instruction following. (4) Comprehensive evaluation across 4B and 8B parameter Qwen3-VL models showing that our methods outperform other baselines in the majority of compositional tasks, validated by human evaluations.

Intrigued by the claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in LLMs trained on general web corpora, in this paper, we set out to investigate their planning capabilities. We aim to evaluate (1) the effectiveness of LLMs in generating plans autonomously in commonsense planning tasks and (2) the potential of LLMs as a source of heuristic guidance for other agents (AI planners) in their planning tasks. We conduct a systematic study by generating a suite of instances on domains similar to the ones employed in the International Planning Competition and evaluate LLMs in two distinct modes: autonomous and heuristic. Our findings reveal that LLMs' ability to generate executable plans autonomously is rather limited, with the best model (GPT-4) having an average success rate of ~12% across the domains. However, the results in the heuristic mode show more promise. In the heuristic mode, we demonstrate that LLM-generated plans can improve the search process for underlying sound planners and additionally show that external verifiers can help provide feedback on the generated plans and back-prompt the LLM for better plan generation.

The challenge of generating reliable local plans has long hindered practical applications in highly cluttered and dynamic environments. Key fundamental bottlenecks include acquiring large-scale expert demonstrations across diverse scenes and improving learning efficiency with limited data. This paper proposes SanD-Planner, a sample-efficient diffusion-based local planner that conducts depth image-based imitation learning within the clamped B-spline space. By operating within this compact space, the proposed algorithm inherently yields smooth outputs with bounded prediction errors over local supports, naturally aligning with receding-horizon execution. Integration of an ESDF-based safety checker with explicit clearance and time-to-completion metrics further reduces the training burden associated with value-function learning for feasibility assessment. Experiments show that training with 500 episodes (merely 0.25% of the demonstration scale used by the baseline), SanD-Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance on the evaluated open benchmark, attaining success rates of 90.1% in simulated cluttered environments and 72.0% in indoor simulations. The performance is further proven by demonstrating zero-shot transferability to realistic experimentation in both 2D and 3D scenes. The dataset and pre-trained models will also be open-sourced.

We introduce a novel sketch-to-image tool that aligns with the iterative refinement process of artists. Our tool lets users sketch blocking strokes to coarsely represent the placement and form of objects and detail strokes to refine their shape and silhouettes. We develop a two-pass algorithm for generating high-fidelity images from such sketches at any point in the iterative process. In the first pass we use a ControlNet to generate an image that strictly follows all the strokes (blocking and detail) and in the second pass we add variation by renoising regions surrounding blocking strokes. We also present a dataset generation scheme that, when used to train a ControlNet architecture, allows regions that do not contain strokes to be interpreted as not-yet-specified regions rather than empty space. We show that this partial-sketch-aware ControlNet can generate coherent elements from partial sketches that only contain a small number of strokes. The high-fidelity images produced by our approach serve as scaffolds that can help the user adjust the shape and proportions of objects or add additional elements to the composition. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with a variety of examples and evaluative comparisons. Quantitatively, evaluative user feedback indicates that novice viewers prefer the quality of images from our algorithm over a baseline Scribble ControlNet for 84% of the pairs and found our images had less distortion in 81% of the pairs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as robotic planners but often struggle with long-horizon and complex tasks, especially in specialized environments requiring external knowledge. While hierarchical planning and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) address some of these challenges, they remain insufficient on their own and a deeper integration is required for achieving more reliable systems. To this end, we propose a neuro-symbolic approach that enhances LLMs-based planners with Knowledge Graph-based RAG for hierarchical plan generation. This method decomposes complex tasks into manageable subtasks, further expanded into executable atomic action sequences. To ensure formal correctness and proper decomposition, we integrate a Symbolic Validator, which also functions as a failure detector by aligning expected and observed world states. Our evaluation against baseline methods demonstrates the consistent significant advantages of integrating hierarchical planning, symbolic verification, and RAG across tasks of varying complexity and different LLMs. Additionally, our experimental setup and novel metrics not only validate our approach for complex planning but also serve as a tool for assessing LLMs' reasoning and compositional capabilities.

Planning in textual environments have been shown to be a long-standing challenge even for current models. A recent, promising line of work uses LLMs to generate a formal representation of the environment that can be solved by a symbolic planner. However, existing methods rely on a fully-observed environment where all entity states are initially known, so a one-off representation can be constructed, leading to a complete plan. In contrast, we tackle partially-observed environments where there is initially no sufficient information to plan for the end-goal. We propose PDDLEGO that iteratively construct a planning representation that can lead to a partial plan for a given sub-goal. By accomplishing the sub-goal, more information is acquired to augment the representation, eventually achieving the end-goal. We show that plans produced by few-shot PDDLEGO are 43% more efficient than generating plans end-to-end on the Coin Collector simulation, with strong performance (98%) on the more complex Cooking World simulation where end-to-end LLMs fail to generate coherent plans (4%).

There have been widespread claims about Large Language Models (LLMs) being able to successfully verify or self-critique their candidate solutions in reasoning problems in an iterative mode. Intrigued by those claims, in this paper we set out to investigate the verification/self-critiquing abilities of large language models in the context of planning. We evaluate a planning system that employs LLMs for both plan generation and verification. We assess the verifier LLM's performance against ground-truth verification, the impact of self-critiquing on plan generation, and the influence of varying feedback levels on system performance. Using GPT-4, a state-of-the-art LLM, for both generation and verification, our findings reveal that self-critiquing appears to diminish plan generation performance, especially when compared to systems with external, sound verifiers and the LLM verifiers in that system produce a notable number of false positives, compromising the system's reliability. Additionally, the nature of feedback, whether binary or detailed, showed minimal impact on plan generation. Collectively, our results cast doubt on the effectiveness of LLMs in a self-critiquing, iterative framework for planning tasks.

In this paper, we present Batch Informed Trees (BIT*), a planning algorithm based on unifying graph- and sampling-based planning techniques. By recognizing that a set of samples describes an implicit random geometric graph (RGG), we are able to combine the efficient ordered nature of graph-based techniques, such as A*, with the anytime scalability of sampling-based algorithms, such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT). BIT* uses a heuristic to efficiently search a series of increasingly dense implicit RGGs while reusing previous information. It can be viewed as an extension of incremental graph-search techniques, such as Lifelong Planning A* (LPA*), to continuous problem domains as well as a generalization of existing sampling-based optimal planners. It is shown that it is probabilistically complete and asymptotically optimal. We demonstrate the utility of BIT* on simulated random worlds in R^2 and R^8 and manipulation problems on CMU's HERB, a 14-DOF two-armed robot. On these problems, BIT* finds better solutions faster than RRT, RRT*, Informed RRT*, and Fast Marching Trees (FMT*) with faster anytime convergence towards the optimum, especially in high dimensions.

The rapid development of AR/VR brings tremendous demands for 3D content. While the widely-used Computer-Aided Design (CAD) method requires a time-consuming and labor-intensive modeling process, sketch-based 3D modeling offers a potential solution as a natural form of computer-human interaction. However, the sparsity and ambiguity of sketches make it challenging to generate high-fidelity content reflecting creators' ideas. Precise drawing from multiple views or strategic step-by-step drawings is often required to tackle the challenge but is not friendly to novice users. In this work, we introduce a novel end-to-end approach, Deep3DSketch+, which performs 3D modeling using only a single free-hand sketch without inputting multiple sketches or view information. Specifically, we introduce a lightweight generation network for efficient inference in real-time and a structural-aware adversarial training approach with a Stroke Enhancement Module (SEM) to capture the structural information to facilitate learning of the realistic and fine-detailed shape structures for high-fidelity performance. Extensive experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both synthetic and real datasets.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed to tackle complex tasks, often necessitating collaboration among multiple specialized agents. However, multi-agent collaboration introduces new challenges in planning, coordination, and verification. Execution failures frequently arise not from flawed reasoning alone, but from subtle misalignments in task interpretation, output format, or inter-agent handoffs. To address these challenges, we present VeriMAP, a framework for multi-agent collaboration with verification-aware planning. The VeriMAP planner decomposes tasks, models subtask dependencies, and encodes planner-defined passing criteria as subtask verification functions (VFs) in Python and natural language. We evaluate VeriMAP on diverse datasets, demonstrating that it outperforms both single- and multi-agent baselines while enhancing system robustness and interpretability. Our analysis highlights how verification-aware planning enables reliable coordination and iterative refinement in multi-agent systems, without relying on external labels or annotations.

We propose GroundUp, the first sketch-based ideation tool for 3D city massing of urban areas. We focus on early-stage urban design, where sketching is a common tool and the design starts from balancing building volumes (masses) and open spaces. With Human-Centered AI in mind, we aim to help architects quickly revise their ideas by easily switching between 2D sketches and 3D models, allowing for smoother iteration and sharing of ideas. Inspired by feedback from architects and existing workflows, our system takes as a first input a user sketch of multiple buildings in a top-down view. The user then draws a perspective sketch of the envisioned site. Our method is designed to exploit the complementarity of information in the two sketches and allows users to quickly preview and adjust the inferred 3D shapes. Our model has two main components. First, we propose a novel sketch-to-depth prediction network for perspective sketches that exploits top-down sketch shapes. Second, we use depth cues derived from the perspective sketch as a condition to our diffusion model, which ultimately completes the geometry in a top-down view. Thus, our final 3D geometry is represented as a heightfield, allowing users to construct the city `from the ground up'.

Compositional visual reasoning methods, which translate a complex query into a structured composition of feasible visual tasks, have exhibited a strong potential in complicated multi-modal tasks. Empowered by recent advances in large language models (LLMs), this multi-modal challenge has been brought to a new stage by treating LLMs as few-shot/zero-shot planners, i.e., vision-language (VL) programming. Such methods, despite their numerous merits, suffer from challenges due to LLM planning mistakes or inaccuracy of visual execution modules, lagging behind the non-compositional models. In this work, we devise a "plug-and-play" method, ExoViP, to correct errors in both the planning and execution stages through introspective verification. We employ verification modules as "exoskeletons" to enhance current VL programming schemes. Specifically, our proposed verification module utilizes a mixture of three sub-verifiers to validate predictions after each reasoning step, subsequently calibrating the visual module predictions and refining the reasoning trace planned by LLMs. Experimental results on two representative VL programming methods showcase consistent improvements on five compositional reasoning tasks on standard benchmarks. In light of this, we believe that ExoViP can foster better performance and generalization on open-domain multi-modal challenges.

Vision-language models solve geometry problems with rising accuracy, yet their intermediate states remain latent and unverifiable: a relation expressed in textual reasoning or drawing code carries no guarantee that a constraint-satisfying configuration realizes it. We observe that existing externalization methods based on rendered pixels or one-shot scripts fail to provide exact, per-action geometric guarantees. Enforcing geometric relations by algebraic definition closes this gap: the workspace becomes a constraint-checked evolving canvas. We present Draw2Think, a framework that recasts geometric reasoning from latent spatial inference into agentic interaction with the GeoGebra constraint engine. In a Propose-Draw-Verify loop, Draw2Think externalizes hypotheses onto an executable canvas, measures exact geometric quantities, and feeds structured observations back to the model, so subsequent reasoning proceeds from checked canvas state grounded by the shared workspace. This externalization makes two properties separately auditable: model-level Construction Fidelity (whether the canvas realizes the intended configuration) and engine-level Measurement Faithfulness (exact values and relations from canvas constraints). Across construction, outcome, and rendering evaluations, Draw2Think builds canvases that pass 95.9% predicate-level and 84.0% strict problem-level construction checks on GeoGoal, improves outcome accuracy by up to 4.1%/16.4% on planar/solid benchmarks, and attains 68.2%/90.5% strict/relaxed rendering scores on GenExam-math. Project page is available at https://draw2think.github.io/

Generating low-level robot task plans from high-level natural language instructions remains a challenging problem. Although large language models have shown promising results in generating plans, the accuracy of the output remains unverified. Furthermore, the lack of domain-specific language data poses a limitation on the applicability of these models. In this paper, we propose CLAIRIFY, a novel approach that combines automatic iterative prompting with program verification to ensure programs written in data-scarce domain-specific language are syntactically valid and incorporate environment constraints. Our approach provides effective guidance to the language model on generating structured-like task plans by incorporating any errors as feedback, while the verifier ensures the syntactic accuracy of the generated plans. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CLAIRIFY in planning chemistry experiments by achieving state-of-the-art results. We also show that the generated plans can be executed on a real robot by integrating them with a task and motion planner.

Graphic layout generation is a growing research area focusing on generating aesthetically pleasing layouts ranging from poster designs to documents. While recent research has explored ways to incorporate user constraints to guide the layout generation, these constraints often require complex specifications which reduce usability. We introduce an innovative approach exploiting user-provided sketches as intuitive constraints and we demonstrate empirically the effectiveness of this new guidance method, establishing the sketch-to-layout problem as a promising research direction, which is currently under-explored. To tackle the sketch-to-layout problem, we propose a multimodal transformer-based solution using the sketch and the content assets as inputs to produce high quality layouts. Since collecting sketch training data from human annotators to train our model is very costly, we introduce a novel and efficient method to synthetically generate training sketches at scale. We train and evaluate our model on three publicly available datasets: PubLayNet, DocLayNet and SlidesVQA, demonstrating that it outperforms state-of-the-art constraint-based methods, while offering a more intuitive design experience. In order to facilitate future sketch-to-layout research, we release O(200k) synthetically-generated sketches for the public datasets above. The datasets are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/sketch_to_layout.

Visual planning represents a crucial facet of human intelligence, especially in tasks that require complex spatial reasoning and navigation. Yet, in machine learning, this inherently visual problem is often tackled through a verbal-centric lens. While recent research demonstrates the promise of fully visual approaches, they suffer from significant computational inefficiency due to the step-by-step planning-by-generation paradigm. In this work, we present EAR, an editing-as-reasoning paradigm that reformulates visual planning as a single-step image transformation. To isolate intrinsic reasoning from visual recognition, we employ abstract puzzles as probing tasks and introduce AMAZE, a procedurally generated dataset that features the classical Maze and Queen problems, covering distinct, complementary forms of visual planning. The abstract nature of AMAZE also facilitates automatic evaluation of autoregressive and diffusion-based models in terms of both pixel-wise fidelity and logical validity. We assess leading proprietary and open-source editing models. The results show that they all struggle in the zero-shot setting, finetuning on basic scales enables remarkable generalization to larger in-domain scales and out-of-domain scales and geometries. However, our best model that runs on high-end hardware fails to match the zero-shot efficiency of human solvers, highlighting a persistent gap in neural visual reasoning.

Significant progress has recently been made in creative applications of large pre-trained models for downstream tasks in 3D vision, such as text-to-shape generation. This motivates our investigation of how these pre-trained models can be used effectively to generate 3D shapes from sketches, which has largely remained an open challenge due to the limited sketch-shape paired datasets and the varying level of abstraction in the sketches. We discover that conditioning a 3D generative model on the features (obtained from a frozen large pre-trained vision model) of synthetic renderings during training enables us to effectively generate 3D shapes from sketches at inference time. This suggests that the large pre-trained vision model features carry semantic signals that are resilient to domain shifts, i.e., allowing us to use only RGB renderings, but generalizing to sketches at inference time. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments investigating different design factors and demonstrate the effectiveness of our straightforward approach for generation of multiple 3D shapes per each input sketch regardless of their level of abstraction without requiring any paired datasets during training.

When answering questions about images, humans naturally point, label, and draw to explain their reasoning. In contrast, modern vision-language models (VLMs) such as Gemini-3-Pro and GPT-5 only respond with text, which can be difficult for users to verify. We present SketchVLM, a training-free, model-agnostic framework that enables VLMs to produce non-destructive, editable SVG overlays on the input image to visually explain their answers. Across seven benchmarks spanning visual reasoning (maze navigation, ball-drop trajectory prediction, and object counting) and drawing (part labeling, connecting-the-dots, and drawing shapes around objects), SketchVLM improves visual reasoning task accuracy by up to +28.5 percentage points and annotation quality by up to 1.48x relative to image-editing and fine-tuned sketching baselines, while also producing annotations that are more faithful to the model's stated answer. We find that single-turn generation already achieves strong accuracy and annotation quality, and multi-turn generation opens up further opportunities for human-AI collaboration. An interactive demo and code are at https://sketchvlm.github.io/.

Mobile GUI agents have shown strong potential in real-world automation and practical applications. However, most existing agents remain reactive, making decisions mainly from current screen, which limits their performance on long-horizon tasks. Building a world model from repeated interactions enables forecasting action outcomes and supports better decision making for mobile GUI agents. This is challenging because the model must predict post-action states with spatial awareness while remaining efficient enough for practical deployment. In this paper, we propose MobileDreamer, an efficient world-model-based lookahead framework to equip the GUI agents based on the future imagination provided by the world model. It consists of textual sketch world model and rollout imagination for GUI agent. Textual sketch world model forecasts post-action states through a learning process to transform digital images into key task-related sketches, and designs a novel order-invariant learning strategy to preserve the spatial information of GUI elements. The rollout imagination strategy for GUI agent optimizes the action-selection process by leveraging the prediction capability of world model. Experiments on Android World show that MobileDreamer achieves state-of-the-art performance and improves task success by 5.25%. World model evaluations further verify that our textual sketch modeling accurately forecasts key GUI elements.

We propose Text2Motion, a language-based planning framework enabling robots to solve sequential manipulation tasks that require long-horizon reasoning. Given a natural language instruction, our framework constructs both a task- and motion-level plan that is verified to reach inferred symbolic goals. Text2Motion uses feasibility heuristics encoded in Q-functions of a library of skills to guide task planning with Large Language Models. Whereas previous language-based planners only consider the feasibility of individual skills, Text2Motion actively resolves geometric dependencies spanning skill sequences by performing geometric feasibility planning during its search. We evaluate our method on a suite of problems that require long-horizon reasoning, interpretation of abstract goals, and handling of partial affordance perception. Our experiments show that Text2Motion can solve these challenging problems with a success rate of 82%, while prior state-of-the-art language-based planning methods only achieve 13%. Text2Motion thus provides promising generalization characteristics to semantically diverse sequential manipulation tasks with geometric dependencies between skills.

Recent advancements, such as DeepSeek-Prover-V2-671B and Kimina-Prover-Preview-72B, demonstrate a prevailing trend in leveraging reinforcement learning (RL)-based large-scale training for automated theorem proving. Surprisingly, we discover that even without any training, careful neuro-symbolic coordination of existing off-the-shelf reasoning models and tactic step provers can achieve comparable performance. This paper introduces DSP+, an improved version of the Draft, Sketch, and Prove framework, featuring a fine-grained and integrated neuro-symbolic enhancement for each phase: (1) In the draft phase, we prompt reasoning models to generate concise natural-language subgoals to benefit the sketch phase, removing thinking tokens and references to human-written proofs; (2) In the sketch phase, subgoals are autoformalized with hypotheses to benefit the proving phase, and sketch lines containing syntactic errors are masked according to predefined rules; (3) In the proving phase, we tightly integrate symbolic search methods like Aesop with step provers to establish proofs for the sketch subgoals. Experimental results show that, without any additional model training or fine-tuning, DSP+ solves 80.7\%, 32.8\%, and 24 out of 644 problems from miniF2F, ProofNet, and PutnamBench, respectively, while requiring fewer budgets compared to state-of-the-arts. DSP+ proves imo\_2019\_p1, an IMO problem in miniF2F that is not solved by any prior work. Additionally, DSP+ generates proof patterns comprehensible by human experts, facilitating the identification of formalization errors; For example, eight wrongly formalized statements in miniF2F are discovered. Our results highlight the potential of classical reasoning patterns besides the RL-based training. All components will be open-sourced.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various artificial intelligence problems. However, they fail to plan reliably, even when prompted with a detailed definition of the planning task. Attempts to improve their planning capabilities, such as chain-of-thought prompting, fine-tuning, and explicit "reasoning" still yield incorrect plans and usually fail to generalize to larger tasks. In this paper, we show how to use LLMs to generate correct plans, even for out-of-distribution tasks of increasing size. For a given planning domain, we ask an LLM to generate several domain-dependent heuristic functions in the form of Python code, evaluate them on a set of training tasks within a greedy best-first search, and choose the strongest one. The resulting LLM-generated heuristics solve many more unseen test tasks than state-of-the-art domain-independent heuristics for classical planning. They are even competitive with the strongest learning algorithm for domain-dependent planning. These findings are especially remarkable given that our proof-of-concept implementation is based on an unoptimized Python planner and the baselines all build upon highly optimized C++ code. In some domains, the LLM-generated heuristics expand fewer states than the baselines, revealing that they are not only efficiently computable, but sometimes even more informative than the state-of-the-art heuristics. Overall, our results show that sampling a set of planning heuristic function programs can significantly improve the planning capabilities of LLMs.

Sketch-based image manipulation is an interactive image editing task to modify an image based on input sketches from users. Existing methods typically formulate this task as a conditional inpainting problem, which requires users to draw an extra mask indicating the region to modify in addition to sketches. The masked regions are regarded as holes and filled by an inpainting model conditioned on the sketch. With this formulation, paired training data can be easily obtained by randomly creating masks and extracting edges or contours. Although this setup simplifies data preparation and model design, it complicates user interaction and discards useful information in masked regions. To this end, we investigate a new paradigm of sketch-based image manipulation: mask-free local image manipulation, which only requires sketch inputs from users and utilizes the entire original image. Given an image and sketch, our model automatically predicts the target modification region and encodes it into a structure agnostic style vector. A generator then synthesizes the new image content based on the style vector and sketch. The manipulated image is finally produced by blending the generator output into the modification region of the original image. Our model can be trained in a self-supervised fashion by learning the reconstruction of an image region from the style vector and sketch. The proposed method offers simpler and more intuitive user workflows for sketch-based image manipulation and provides better results than previous approaches. More results, code and interactive demo will be available at https://zengxianyu.github.io/sketchedit.

This study introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline that converts unscaled, hand-drawn floor plan sketches into semantically consistent 3D BIM models. The workflow leverages multimodal large language models (MLLMs) within a multi-agent framework, combining perceptual extraction, human feedback, schema validation, and automated BIM scripting. Initially, sketches are iteratively refined into a structured JSON layout of walls, doors, and windows. Later, these layouts are transformed into executable scripts that generate 3D BIM models. Experiments on ten diverse floor plans demonstrate strong convergence: openings (doors, windows) are captured with high reliability in the initial pass, while wall detection begins around 83% and achieves near-perfect alignment after a few feedback iterations. Across all categories, precision, recall, and F1 scores remain above 0.83, and geometric errors (RMSE, MAE) progressively decrease to zero through feedback corrections. This study demonstrates how MLLM-driven multi-agent reasoning can make BIM creation accessible to both experts and non-experts using only freehand sketches.

Generalization remains one of the most important desiderata for robust robot learning systems. While recently proposed approaches show promise in generalization to novel objects, semantic concepts, or visual distribution shifts, generalization to new tasks remains challenging. For example, a language-conditioned policy trained on pick-and-place tasks will not be able to generalize to a folding task, even if the arm trajectory of folding is similar to pick-and-place. Our key insight is that this kind of generalization becomes feasible if we represent the task through rough trajectory sketches. We propose a policy conditioning method using such rough trajectory sketches, which we call RT-Trajectory, that is practical, easy to specify, and allows the policy to effectively perform new tasks that would otherwise be challenging to perform. We find that trajectory sketches strike a balance between being detailed enough to express low-level motion-centric guidance while being coarse enough to allow the learned policy to interpret the trajectory sketch in the context of situational visual observations. In addition, we show how trajectory sketches can provide a useful interface to communicate with robotic policies: they can be specified through simple human inputs like drawings or videos, or through automated methods such as modern image-generating or waypoint-generating methods. We evaluate RT-Trajectory at scale on a variety of real-world robotic tasks, and find that RT-Trajectory is able to perform a wider range of tasks compared to language-conditioned and goal-conditioned policies, when provided the same training data.

State-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but may struggle with complex reasoning and factual correctness. Existing methods harness the strengths of chain-of-thought and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to decompose a complex problem into simpler steps and apply retrieval to improve factual correctness. These methods work well on straightforward reasoning tasks but often falter on challenging tasks such as competitive programming and mathematics, due to frequent reasoning errors and irrelevant knowledge retrieval. To address this, we introduce Critic-guided planning with Retrieval-augmentation, CR-Planner, a novel framework that leverages fine-tuned critic models to guide both reasoning and retrieval processes through planning. CR-Planner solves a problem by iteratively selecting and executing sub-goals. Initially, it identifies the most promising sub-goal from reasoning, query generation, and retrieval, guided by rewards given by a critic model named sub-goal critic. It then executes this sub-goal through sampling and selecting the optimal output based on evaluations from another critic model named execution critic. This iterative process, informed by retrieved information and critic models, enables CR-Planner to effectively navigate the solution space towards the final answer. We employ Monte Carlo Tree Search to collect the data for training the critic models, allowing for a systematic exploration of action sequences and their long-term impacts. We validate CR-Planner on challenging domain-knowledge-intensive and reasoning-heavy tasks, including competitive programming, theorem-driven math reasoning, and complex domain retrieval problems. Our experiments demonstrate that CR-Planner significantly outperforms baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in addressing challenging problems by improving both reasoning and retrieval.

Existing text-based 3D generation methods generate attractive results but lack detailed geometry control. Sketches, known for their conciseness and expressiveness, have contributed to intuitive 3D modeling but are confined to producing texture-less mesh models within predefined categories. Integrating sketch and text simultaneously for 3D generation promises enhanced control over geometry and appearance but faces challenges from 2D-to-3D translation ambiguity and multi-modal condition integration. Moreover, further editing of 3D models in arbitrary views will give users more freedom to customize their models. However, it is difficult to achieve high generation quality, preserve unedited regions, and manage proper interactions between shape components. To solve the above issues, we propose a text-driven 3D content generation and editing method, SketchDream, which supports NeRF generation from given hand-drawn sketches and achieves free-view sketch-based local editing. To tackle the 2D-to-3D ambiguity challenge, we introduce a sketch-based multi-view image generation diffusion model, which leverages depth guidance to establish spatial correspondence. A 3D ControlNet with a 3D attention module is utilized to control multi-view images and ensure their 3D consistency. To support local editing, we further propose a coarse-to-fine editing approach: the coarse phase analyzes component interactions and provides 3D masks to label edited regions, while the fine stage generates realistic results with refined details by local enhancement. Extensive experiments validate that our method generates higher-quality results compared with a combination of 2D ControlNet and image-to-3D generation techniques and achieves detailed control compared with existing diffusion-based 3D editing approaches.

One tough problem of image inpainting is to restore complex structures in the corrupted regions. It motivates interactive image inpainting which leverages additional hints, e.g., sketches, to assist the inpainting process. Sketch is simple and intuitive to end users, but meanwhile has free forms with much randomness. Such randomness may confuse the inpainting models, and incur severe artifacts in completed images. To address this problem, we propose a two-stage image inpainting method termed SketchRefiner. In the first stage, we propose using a cross-correlation loss function to robustly calibrate and refine the user-provided sketches in a coarse-to-fine fashion. In the second stage, we learn to extract informative features from the abstracted sketches in the feature space and modulate the inpainting process. We also propose an algorithm to simulate real sketches automatically and build a test protocol with different applications. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that SketchRefiner effectively utilizes sketch information and eliminates the artifacts due to the free-form sketches. Our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art ones both qualitatively and quantitatively, meanwhile revealing great potential in real-world applications. Our code and dataset are available.

Large language model (LLM) based task plans and corresponding human demonstrations for embodied AI may be noisy, with unnecessary actions, redundant navigation, and logical errors that reduce policy quality. We propose an iterative verification framework in which a Judge LLM critiques action sequences and a Planner LLM applies the revisions, yielding progressively cleaner and more spatially coherent trajectories. Unlike rule-based approaches, our method relies on natural language prompting, enabling broad generalization across error types including irrelevant actions, contradictions, and missing steps. On a set of manually annotated actions from the TEACh embodied AI dataset, our framework achieves up to 90% recall and 100% precision across four state-of-the-art LLMs (GPT o4-mini, DeepSeek-R1, Gemini 2.5, LLaMA 4 Scout). The refinement loop converges quickly, with 96.5% of sequences requiring at most three iterations, while improving both temporal efficiency and spatial action organization. Crucially, the method preserves human error-recovery patterns rather than collapsing them, supporting future work on robust corrective behavior. By establishing plan verification as a reliable LLM capability for spatial planning and action refinement, we provide a scalable path to higher-quality training data for imitation learning in embodied AI.

Large Language Model (LLM)-powered agents have unlocked new possibilities for automating human tasks. While prior work has focused on well-defined tasks with specified goals, the capabilities of agents in creative design tasks with open-ended goals remain underexplored. We introduce GraphicBench, a new planning benchmark for graphic design that covers 1,079 user queries and input images across four design types. We further present GraphicTown, an LLM agent framework with three design experts and 46 actions (tools) to choose from for executing each step of the planned workflows in web environments. Experiments with six LLMs demonstrate their ability to generate workflows that integrate both explicit design constraints from user queries and implicit commonsense constraints. However, these workflows often do not lead to successful execution outcomes, primarily due to challenges in: (1) reasoning about spatial relationships, (2) coordinating global dependencies across experts, and (3) retrieving the most appropriate action per step. We envision GraphicBench as a challenging yet valuable testbed for advancing LLM-agent planning and execution in creative design tasks.

Abstraction is at the heart of sketching due to the simple and minimal nature of line drawings. Abstraction entails identifying the essential visual properties of an object or scene, which requires semantic understanding and prior knowledge of high-level concepts. Abstract depictions are therefore challenging for artists, and even more so for machines. We present CLIPasso, an object sketching method that can achieve different levels of abstraction, guided by geometric and semantic simplifications. While sketch generation methods often rely on explicit sketch datasets for training, we utilize the remarkable ability of CLIP (Contrastive-Language-Image-Pretraining) to distill semantic concepts from sketches and images alike. We define a sketch as a set of B\'ezier curves and use a differentiable rasterizer to optimize the parameters of the curves directly with respect to a CLIP-based perceptual loss. The abstraction degree is controlled by varying the number of strokes. The generated sketches demonstrate multiple levels of abstraction while maintaining recognizability, underlying structure, and essential visual components of the subject drawn.

LLM agents increasingly operate in large tool ecosystems, where real-world tasks require discovering relevant tools, inferring implicit sub-goals, and adapting to dynamic environments over long horizons. However, existing benchmarks rarely evaluate planning under retrieval-limited tool visibility. To address this gap, we introduce PlanBench-XL, an interactive benchmark of 327 retail tasks over 1,665 tools that tests whether agents can iteratively retrieve usable tools, invoke them to uncover intermediate evidence for subsequent calls toward the final goal. PlanBench-XL further features an optional blocking mechanism that simulates real-world unpredictability through missing, failing, or distracting tool functions, forcing agents to detect disrupted paths and adapt at runtime. Experiments on ten leading LLMs show that massive-tool planning remains challenging: while GPT-5.4 achieves 51.90% accuracy in block-free settings, it collapses to 11.36% under the most severe blocking condition. Further analysis shows that agents are especially vulnerable when failures lack explicit error signals or when recovery requires longer alternative tool-use paths. These results establish PlanBench-XL as a testbed for diagnosing agentic planning failures and highlight the need for robust adaptive planning in long-horizon tasks with large, imperfect tool environments.

Parametric computer-aided design (CAD) tools are the predominant way that engineers specify physical structures, from bicycle pedals to airplanes to printed circuit boards. The key characteristic of parametric CAD is that design intent is encoded not only via geometric primitives, but also by parameterized constraints between the elements. This relational specification can be viewed as the construction of a constraint program, allowing edits to coherently propagate to other parts of the design. Machine learning offers the intriguing possibility of accelerating the design process via generative modeling of these structures, enabling new tools such as autocompletion, constraint inference, and conditional synthesis. In this work, we present such an approach to generative modeling of parametric CAD sketches, which constitute the basic computational building blocks of modern mechanical design. Our model, trained on real-world designs from the SketchGraphs dataset, autoregressively synthesizes sketches as sequences of primitives, with initial coordinates, and constraints that reference back to the sampled primitives. As samples from the model match the constraint graph representation used in standard CAD software, they may be directly imported, solved, and edited according to downstream design tasks. In addition, we condition the model on various contexts, including partial sketches (primers) and images of hand-drawn sketches. Evaluation of the proposed approach demonstrates its ability to synthesize realistic CAD sketches and its potential to aid the mechanical design workflow.

This paper, for the very first time, introduces human sketches to the landscape of XAI (Explainable Artificial Intelligence). We argue that sketch as a ``human-centred'' data form, represents a natural interface to study explainability. We focus on cultivating sketch-specific explainability designs. This starts by identifying strokes as a unique building block that offers a degree of flexibility in object construction and manipulation impossible in photos. Following this, we design a simple explainability-friendly sketch encoder that accommodates the intrinsic properties of strokes: shape, location, and order. We then move on to define the first ever XAI task for sketch, that of stroke location inversion SLI. Just as we have heat maps for photos, and correlation matrices for text, SLI offers an explainability angle to sketch in terms of asking a network how well it can recover stroke locations of an unseen sketch. We offer qualitative results for readers to interpret as snapshots of the SLI process in the paper, and as GIFs on the project page. A minor but interesting note is that thanks to its sketch-specific design, our sketch encoder also yields the best sketch recognition accuracy to date while having the smallest number of parameters. The code is available at https://sketchxai.github.io.

We develop a method for producing vector sketches one part at a time. To do this, we train a multi-modal language model-based agent using a novel multi-turn process-reward reinforcement learning following supervised fine-tuning. Our approach is enabled by a new dataset we call ControlSketch-Part, containing rich part-level annotations for sketches, obtained using a novel, generic automatic annotation pipeline that segments vector sketches into semantic parts and assigns paths to parts with a structured multi-stage labeling process. Our results indicate that incorporating structured part-level data and providing agent with the visual feedback through the process enables interpretable, controllable, and locally editable text-to-vector sketch generation.

Planning is central to agents and agentic AI. The ability to plan, e.g., creating travel itineraries within a budget, holds immense potential in both scientific and commercial contexts. Moreover, optimal plans tend to require fewer resources compared to ad-hoc methods. To date, a comprehensive understanding of existing planning benchmarks appears to be lacking. Without it, comparing planning algorithms' performance across domains or selecting suitable algorithms for new scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we examine a range of planning benchmarks to identify commonly used testbeds for algorithm development and highlight potential gaps. These benchmarks are categorized into embodied environments, web navigation, scheduling, games and puzzles, and everyday task automation. Our study recommends the most appropriate benchmarks for various algorithms and offers insights to guide future benchmark development.

Sketches are a natural and accessible medium for UI designers to conceptualize early-stage ideas. However, existing research on UI/UX automation often requires high-fidelity inputs like Figma designs or detailed screenshots, limiting accessibility and impeding efficient design iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce Sketch2Code, a benchmark that evaluates state-of-the-art Vision Language Models (VLMs) on automating the conversion of rudimentary sketches into webpage prototypes. Beyond end-to-end benchmarking, Sketch2Code supports interactive agent evaluation that mimics real-world design workflows, where a VLM-based agent iteratively refines its generations by communicating with a simulated user, either passively receiving feedback instructions or proactively asking clarification questions. We comprehensively analyze ten commercial and open-source models, showing that Sketch2Code is challenging for existing VLMs; even the most capable models struggle to accurately interpret sketches and formulate effective questions that lead to steady improvement. Nevertheless, a user study with UI/UX experts reveals a significant preference for proactive question-asking over passive feedback reception, highlighting the need to develop more effective paradigms for multi-turn conversational agents.

Artificial Intelligence Generated Content (AIGC) has shown remarkable progress in generating realistic images. However, in this paper, we take a step "backward" and address AIGC for the most rudimentary visual modality of human sketches. Our objective is on the creative nature of sketches, and that creative sketching should take the form of an interactive process. We further enable text to drive the sketch ideation process, allowing creativity to be freely defined, while simultaneously tackling the challenge of "I can't sketch". We present a method to generate controlled sketches using a text-conditioned diffusion model trained on pixel representations of images. Our proposed approach, referred to as SketchDreamer, integrates a differentiable rasteriser of Bezier curves that optimises an initial input to distil abstract semantic knowledge from a pretrained diffusion model. We utilise Score Distillation Sampling to learn a sketch that aligns with a given caption, which importantly enable both text and sketch to interact with the ideation process. Our objective is to empower non-professional users to create sketches and, through a series of optimisation processes, transform a narrative into a storyboard by expanding the text prompt while making minor adjustments to the sketch input. Through this work, we hope to aspire the way we create visual content, democratise the creative process, and inspire further research in enhancing human creativity in AIGC. The code is available at https://github.com/WinKawaks/SketchDreamer.

Sketching serves as a versatile tool for externalizing ideas, enabling rapid exploration and visual communication that spans various disciplines. While artificial systems have driven substantial advances in content creation and human-computer interaction, capturing the dynamic and abstract nature of human sketching remains challenging. In this work, we introduce SketchAgent, a language-driven, sequential sketch generation method that enables users to create, modify, and refine sketches through dynamic, conversational interactions. Our approach requires no training or fine-tuning. Instead, we leverage the sequential nature and rich prior knowledge of off-the-shelf multimodal large language models (LLMs). We present an intuitive sketching language, introduced to the model through in-context examples, enabling it to "draw" using string-based actions. These are processed into vector graphics and then rendered to create a sketch on a pixel canvas, which can be accessed again for further tasks. By drawing stroke by stroke, our agent captures the evolving, dynamic qualities intrinsic to sketching. We demonstrate that SketchAgent can generate sketches from diverse prompts, engage in dialogue-driven drawing, and collaborate meaningfully with human users.

Recent remarkable advances in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models have inspired a significant breakthrough in text-to-3D generation, pursuing 3D content creation solely from a given text prompt. However, existing text-to-3D techniques lack a crucial ability in the creative process: interactively control and shape the synthetic 3D contents according to users' desired specifications (e.g., sketch). To alleviate this issue, we present the first attempt for text-to-3D generation conditioning on the additional hand-drawn sketch, namely Control3D, which enhances controllability for users. In particular, a 2D conditioned diffusion model (ControlNet) is remoulded to guide the learning of 3D scene parameterized as NeRF, encouraging each view of 3D scene aligned with the given text prompt and hand-drawn sketch. Moreover, we exploit a pre-trained differentiable photo-to-sketch model to directly estimate the sketch of the rendered image over synthetic 3D scene. Such estimated sketch along with each sampled view is further enforced to be geometrically consistent with the given sketch, pursuing better controllable text-to-3D generation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposal can generate accurate and faithful 3D scenes that align closely with the input text prompts and sketches.

This paper, for the first time, marries large foundation models with human sketch understanding. We demonstrate what this brings -- a paradigm shift in terms of generalised sketch representation learning (e.g., classification). This generalisation happens on two fronts: (i) generalisation across unknown categories (i.e., open-set), and (ii) generalisation traversing abstraction levels (i.e., good and bad sketches), both being timely challenges that remain unsolved in the sketch literature. Our design is intuitive and centred around transferring the already stellar generalisation ability of CLIP to benefit generalised learning for sketches. We first "condition" the vanilla CLIP model by learning sketch-specific prompts using a novel auxiliary head of raster to vector sketch conversion. This importantly makes CLIP "sketch-aware". We then make CLIP acute to the inherently different sketch abstraction levels. This is achieved by learning a codebook of abstraction-specific prompt biases, a weighted combination of which facilitates the representation of sketches across abstraction levels -- low abstract edge-maps, medium abstract sketches in TU-Berlin, and highly abstract doodles in QuickDraw. Our framework surpasses popular sketch representation learning algorithms in both zero-shot and few-shot setups and in novel settings across different abstraction boundaries.

We present sketch-rnn, a recurrent neural network (RNN) able to construct stroke-based drawings of common objects. The model is trained on thousands of crude human-drawn images representing hundreds of classes. We outline a framework for conditional and unconditional sketch generation, and describe new robust training methods for generating coherent sketch drawings in a vector format.

Sketch editing is central to digital illustration, yet existing image editing systems struggle to preserve the sparse, style-sensitive structure of line art while supporting both high-level semantic changes and precise local redrawing. We present SketchAssist, an interactive sketch drawing assistant that accelerates creation by unifying instruction-guided global edits with line-guided region redrawing, while keeping unrelated regions and overall composition intact. To enable this assistant at scale, we introduce a controllable data generation pipeline that (i) constructs attribute-addition sequences from attribute-free base sketches, (ii) forms multi-step edit chains via cross-sequence sampling, and (iii) expands stylistic coverage with a style-preserving attribute-removal model applied to diverse sketches. Building on this data, SketchAssist employs a unified sketch editing framework with minimal changes to DiT-based editors. We repurpose the RGB channels to encode the inputs, enabling seamless switching between instruction-guided edits and line-guided redrawing within a single input interface. To further specialize behavior across modes, we integrate a task-guided mixture-of-experts into LoRA layers, routing by text and visual cues to improve semantic controllability, structural fidelity, and style preservation. Extensive experiments show state-of-the-art results on both tasks, with superior instruction adherence and style/structure preservation compared to recent baselines. Together, our dataset and SketchAssist provide a practical, controllable assistant for sketch creation and revision.

Computer-aided design (CAD) significantly enhances the efficiency, accuracy, and innovation of design processes by enabling precise 2D and 3D modeling, extensive analysis, and optimization. Existing methods for creating CAD models rely on latent vectors or point clouds, which are difficult to obtain and costly to store. Recent advances in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have inspired researchers to use natural language instructions and images for CAD model construction. However, these models still struggle with inferring accurate 3D spatial location and orientation, leading to inaccuracies in determining the spatial 3D starting points and extrusion directions for constructing geometries. This work introduces CAD-GPT, a CAD synthesis method with spatial reasoning-enhanced MLLM that takes either a single image or a textual description as input. To achieve precise spatial inference, our approach introduces a 3D Modeling Spatial Mechanism. This method maps 3D spatial positions and 3D sketch plane rotation angles into a 1D linguistic feature space using a specialized spatial unfolding mechanism, while discretizing 2D sketch coordinates into an appropriate planar space to enable precise determination of spatial starting position, sketch orientation, and 2D sketch coordinate translations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD-GPT consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods in CAD model synthesis, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Automated Planning and Scheduling is among the growing areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) where mention of LLMs has gained popularity. Based on a comprehensive review of 126 papers, this paper investigates eight categories based on the unique applications of LLMs in addressing various aspects of planning problems: language translation, plan generation, model construction, multi-agent planning, interactive planning, heuristics optimization, tool integration, and brain-inspired planning. For each category, we articulate the issues considered and existing gaps. A critical insight resulting from our review is that the true potential of LLMs unfolds when they are integrated with traditional symbolic planners, pointing towards a promising neuro-symbolic approach. This approach effectively combines the generative aspects of LLMs with the precision of classical planning methods. By synthesizing insights from existing literature, we underline the potential of this integration to address complex planning challenges. Our goal is to encourage the ICAPS community to recognize the complementary strengths of LLMs and symbolic planners, advocating for a direction in automated planning that leverages these synergistic capabilities to develop more advanced and intelligent planning systems.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in reasoning tasks. A key approach is tree-based search with verifiers, which expand candidate reasoning paths and use reward models to guide pruning and selection. Although effective in improving accuracy, these methods are not optimal in terms of efficiency: they perform simple decomposition on the reasoning process, but ignore the planning-execution nature of tasks such as math reasoning or code generation. This results in inefficient exploration of reasoning process. To address this, we propose a dual-phase test-time scaling framework that explicitly separates reasoning into planning and execution, and performs search over the two phases individually. Specifically, we decompose reasoning trajectories and develop reward models for each phase, enabling the search to explore and prune plans and executions separately. We further introduce a dynamic budget allocation mechanism that adaptively redistributes sampling effort based on reward feedback, allowing early stopping on confident steps and reallocation of computation to more challenging parts of the reasoning process. Experiments on both mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks demonstrate that our approach consistently improves accuracy while reducing redundant computation.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their multimodal extensions (MLLMs) have substantially enhanced machine reasoning across diverse tasks. However, these models predominantly rely on pure text as the medium for both expressing and structuring reasoning, even when visual information is present. In this work, we argue that language may not always be the most natural or effective modality for reasoning, particularly in tasks involving spatial and geometrical information. Motivated by this, we propose a new paradigm, Visual Planning, which enables planning through purely visual representations, independent of text. In this paradigm, planning is executed via sequences of images that encode step-by-step inference in the visual domain, akin to how humans sketch or visualize future actions. We introduce a novel reinforcement learning framework, Visual Planning via Reinforcement Learning (VPRL), empowered by GRPO for post-training large vision models, leading to substantial improvements in planning in a selection of representative visual navigation tasks, FrozenLake, Maze, and MiniBehavior. Our visual planning paradigm outperforms all other planning variants that conduct reasoning in the text-only space. Our results establish Visual Planning as a viable and promising alternative to language-based reasoning, opening new avenues for tasks that benefit from intuitive, image-based inference.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable reasoning and planning capabilities. Most prior work in this area has used LLMs to reason through steps from an initial to a goal state or criterion, thereby effectively reasoning in a forward direction. Nonetheless, many planning problems exhibit an inherent asymmetry such that planning backward from the goal is significantly easier -- for example, if there are bottlenecks close to the goal. We take inspiration from this observation and demonstrate that this bias holds for LLM planning as well: planning performance in one direction correlates with the planning complexity of the problem in that direction. However, our experiments also reveal systematic biases which lead to poor planning in the backward direction. With this knowledge, we propose a backward planning algorithm for LLMs that first flips the problem and then plans forward in the flipped problem. This helps avoid the backward bias, generate more diverse candidate plans, and exploit asymmetries between the forward and backward directions in planning problems -- we find that combining planning in both directions with self-verification improves the overall planning success rates by 4-24% in three planning domains.

3D textured face reconstruction from sketches applicable in many scenarios such as animation, 3D avatars, artistic design, missing people search, etc., is a highly promising but underdeveloped research topic. On the one hand, the stylistic diversity of sketches leads to existing sketch-to-3D-face methods only being able to handle pose-limited and realistically shaded sketches. On the other hand, texture plays a vital role in representing facial appearance, yet sketches lack this information, necessitating additional texture control in the reconstruction process. This paper proposes a novel method for reconstructing controllable textured and detailed 3D faces from sketches, named S2TD-Face. S2TD-Face introduces a two-stage geometry reconstruction framework that directly reconstructs detailed geometry from the input sketch. To keep geometry consistent with the delicate strokes of the sketch, we propose a novel sketch-to-geometry loss that ensures the reconstruction accurately fits the input features like dimples and wrinkles. Our training strategies do not rely on hard-to-obtain 3D face scanning data or labor-intensive hand-drawn sketches. Furthermore, S2TD-Face introduces a texture control module utilizing text prompts to select the most suitable textures from a library and seamlessly integrate them into the geometry, resulting in a 3D detailed face with controllable texture. S2TD-Face surpasses existing state-of-the-art methods in extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments. Our project is available at https://github.com/wang-zidu/S2TD-Face .

Real-world multi-modal problems are rarely solved by a single machine learning model, and often require multi-step computational plans that involve stitching several models. Tool-augmented LLMs hold tremendous promise for automating the generation of such computational plans. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating LLMs as planners for multi-step multi-modal tasks has prevented a systematic study of planner design decisions. Should LLMs generate a full plan in a single shot or step-by-step? Should they invoke tools directly with Python code or through structured data formats like JSON? Does feedback improve planning? To answer these questions and more, we introduce m&m's: a benchmark containing 4K+ multi-step multi-modal tasks involving 33 tools that include multi-modal models, (free) public APIs, and image processing modules. For each of these task queries, we provide automatically generated plans using this realistic toolset. We further provide a high-quality subset of 1,565 task plans that are human-verified and correctly executable. With m&m's, we evaluate 6 popular LLMs with 2 planning strategies (multi-step vs. step-by-step planning), 2 plan formats (JSON vs. code), and 3 types of feedback (parsing/verification/execution). Finally, we summarize takeaways from our extensive experiments. Our dataset and code are available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms) and Github (https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

Geometric Problem Solving (GPS) poses a unique challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), requiring not only the joint interpretation of text and diagrams but also iterative visuospatial reasoning. While existing approaches process diagrams as static images, they lack the capacity for dynamic manipulation - a core aspect of human geometric reasoning involving auxiliary line construction and affine transformations. We present GeoSketch, a neural-symbolic framework that recasts geometric reasoning as an interactive perception-reasoning-action loop. GeoSketch integrates: (1) a Perception module that abstracts diagrams into structured logic forms, (2) a Symbolic Reasoning module that applies geometric theorems to decide the next deductive step, and (3) a Sketch Action module that executes operations such as drawing auxiliary lines or applying transformations, thereby updating the diagram in a closed loop. To train this agent, we develop a two-stage pipeline: supervised fine-tuning on 2,000 symbolic-curated trajectories followed by reinforcement learning with dense, symbolic rewards to enhance robustness and strategic exploration. To evaluate this paradigm, we introduce the GeoSketch Benchmark, a high-quality set of 390 geometry problems requiring auxiliary construction or affine transformations. Experiments on strong MLLM baselines demonstrate that GeoSketch significantly improves stepwise reasoning accuracy and problem-solving success over static perception methods. By unifying hierarchical decision-making, executable visual actions, and symbolic verification, GeoSketch advances multimodal reasoning from static interpretation to dynamic, verifiable interaction, establishing a new foundation for solving complex visuospatial problems.

In this paper, we democratise 3D content creation, enabling precise generation of 3D shapes from abstract sketches while overcoming limitations tied to drawing skills. We introduce a novel part-level modelling and alignment framework that facilitates abstraction modelling and cross-modal correspondence. Leveraging the same part-level decoder, our approach seamlessly extends to sketch modelling by establishing correspondence between CLIPasso edgemaps and projected 3D part regions, eliminating the need for a dataset pairing human sketches and 3D shapes. Additionally, our method introduces a seamless in-position editing process as a byproduct of cross-modal part-aligned modelling. Operating in a low-dimensional implicit space, our approach significantly reduces computational demands and processing time.

3D human pose estimation from sketches has broad applications in computer animation and film production. Unlike traditional human pose estimation, this task presents unique challenges due to the abstract and disproportionate nature of sketches. Previous sketch-to-pose methods, constrained by the lack of large-scale sketch-3D pose annotations, primarily relied on optimization with heuristic rules-an approach that is both time-consuming and limited in generalizability. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach leveraging a "learn from synthesis" strategy. First, a diffusion model is trained to synthesize sketch images from 2D poses projected from 3D human poses, mimicking disproportionate human structures in sketches. This process enables the creation of a synthetic dataset, SKEP-120K, consisting of 120k accurate sketch-3D pose annotation pairs across various sketch styles. Building on this synthetic dataset, we introduce an end-to-end data-driven framework for estimating human poses and shapes from diverse sketch styles. Our framework combines existing 2D pose detectors and generative diffusion priors for sketch feature extraction with a feed-forward neural network for efficient 2D pose estimation. Multiple heuristic loss functions are incorporated to guarantee geometric coherence between the derived 3D poses and the detected 2D poses while preserving accurate self-contacts. Qualitative, quantitative, and subjective evaluations collectively show that our model substantially surpasses previous ones in both estimation accuracy and speed for sketch-to-pose tasks.

An AI system for professional floor plan design must precisely control room dimensions and areas while respecting the desired connectivity between rooms and maintaining functional and aesthetic quality. Existing generative approaches focus primarily on respecting the requested connectivity between rooms, but do not support generating floor plans that respect numerical constraints. We introduce a text-based floor plan generation approach that fine-tunes a large language model (LLM) on real plans and then applies reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) to improve adherence to topological and numerical constraints while discouraging invalid or overlapping outputs. Furthermore, we design a set of constraint adherence metrics to systematically measure how generated floor plans align with user-defined constraints. Our model generates floor plans that satisfy user-defined connectivity and numerical constraints and outperforms existing methods on Realism, Compatibility, and Diversity metrics. Across all tasks, our approach achieves at least a 94% relative reduction in Compatibility compared with existing methods. Our results demonstrate that LLMs can effectively handle constraints in this setting, suggesting broader applications for text-based generative modeling.

Recent years have witnessed remarkable progress in generative AI, with natural language emerging as the most common conditioning input. As underlying models grow more powerful, researchers are exploring increasingly diverse conditioning signals, such as depth maps, edge maps, camera parameters, and reference images, to give users finer control over generation. Among different modalities, sketches are a natural and long-standing form of human communication, enabling rapid expression of visual concepts. Previous literature has largely focused on edge maps, often misnamed 'sketches', yet algorithms that effectively handle true freehand sketches, with their inherent abstraction and distortions, remain underexplored. We pursue the challenging goal of balancing photorealism with sketch adherence when generating images from freehand input. A key obstacle is the absence of ground-truth, pixel-aligned images: by their nature, freehand sketches do not have a single correct alignment. To address this, we propose a modulation-based approach that prioritizes semantic interpretation of the sketch over strict adherence to individual edge positions. We further introduce a novel loss that enables training on freehand sketches without requiring ground-truth pixel-aligned images. We show that our method outperforms existing approaches in both semantic alignment with freehand sketch inputs and in the realism and overall quality of the generated images.

A sketch is a distilled form of visual abstraction that conveys core concepts through simplified yet purposeful strokes while omitting extraneous detail. Despite its expressive power, quantifying the efficiency of semantic abstraction in sketches remains challenging. Existing evaluation methods that rely on reference images, low-level visual features, or recognition accuracy do not capture abstraction, the defining property of sketches. To address these limitations, we introduce SEA (Sketch Evaluation metric for Abstraction efficiency), a reference-free metric that assesses how economically a sketch represents class-defining visual elements while preserving semantic recognizability. These elements are derived per class from commonsense knowledge about features typically depicted in sketches. SEA leverages a visual question answering model to determine the presence of each element and returns a quantitative score that reflects semantic retention under visual economy. To support this metric, we present CommonSketch, the first semantically annotated sketch dataset, comprising 23,100 human-drawn sketches across 300 classes, each paired with a caption and element-level annotations. Experiments show that SEA aligns closely with human judgments and reliably discriminates levels of abstraction efficiency, while CommonSketch serves as a benchmark providing systematic evaluation of element-level sketch understanding across various vision-language models.

We consider enhancing large language models (LLMs) for complex planning tasks. While existing methods allow LLMs to explore intermediate steps to make plans, they either depend on unreliable self-verification or external verifiers to evaluate these steps, which demand significant data and computations. Here, we propose automated heuristics discovery (AutoHD), a novel approach that enables LLMs to explicitly generate heuristic functions to guide inference-time search, allowing accurate evaluation of intermediate states. These heuristic functions are further refined through a heuristic evolution process, improving their robustness and effectiveness. Our proposed method requires no additional model training or fine-tuning, and the explicit definition of heuristic functions generated by the LLMs provides interpretability and insights into the reasoning process. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks demonstrate significant gains over multiple baselines, including nearly twice the accuracy on some datasets, establishing our approach as a reliable and interpretable solution for complex planning tasks.

Constructing computer-aided design (CAD) models is labor-intensive but essential for engineering and manufacturing. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have inspired the LLM-based CAD generation by representing CAD as command sequences. But these methods struggle in practical scenarios because command sequence representation does not support entity selection (e.g. faces or edges), limiting its ability to support complex editing operations such as chamfer or fillet. Further, the discretization of a continuous variable during sketch and extrude operations may result in topological errors. To address these limitations, we present Pointer-CAD, a novel LLM-based CAD generation framework that leverages a pointer-based command sequence representation to explicitly incorporate the geometric information of B-rep models into sequential modeling. In particular, Pointer-CAD decomposes CAD model generation into steps, conditioning the generation of each subsequent step on both the textual description and the B-rep generated from previous steps. Whenever an operation requires the selection of a specific geometric entity, the LLM predicts a Pointer that selects the most feature-consistent candidate from the available set. Such a selection operation also reduces the quantization error in the command sequence-based representation. To support the training of Pointer-CAD, we develop a data annotation pipeline that produces expert-level natural language descriptions and apply it to build a dataset of approximately 575K CAD models. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Pointer-CAD effectively supports the generation of complex geometric structures and reduces segmentation error to an extremely low level, achieving a significant improvement over prior command sequence methods, thereby significantly mitigating the topological inaccuracies introduced by quantization error.

Given an abstract, deformed, ordinary sketch from untrained amateurs like you and me, this paper turns it into a photorealistic image - just like those shown in Fig. 1(a), all non-cherry-picked. We differ significantly from prior art in that we do not dictate an edgemap-like sketch to start with, but aim to work with abstract free-hand human sketches. In doing so, we essentially democratise the sketch-to-photo pipeline, "picturing" a sketch regardless of how good you sketch. Our contribution at the outset is a decoupled encoder-decoder training paradigm, where the decoder is a StyleGAN trained on photos only. This importantly ensures that generated results are always photorealistic. The rest is then all centred around how best to deal with the abstraction gap between sketch and photo. For that, we propose an autoregressive sketch mapper trained on sketch-photo pairs that maps a sketch to the StyleGAN latent space. We further introduce specific designs to tackle the abstract nature of human sketches, including a fine-grained discriminative loss on the back of a trained sketch-photo retrieval model, and a partial-aware sketch augmentation strategy. Finally, we showcase a few downstream tasks our generation model enables, amongst them is showing how fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval, a well-studied problem in the sketch community, can be reduced to an image (generated) to image retrieval task, surpassing state-of-the-arts. We put forward generated results in the supplementary for everyone to scrutinise.

We introduce LongCat-Flash-Prover, a flagship 560-billion-parameter open-source Mixture-of- Experts (MoE) model that advances Native Formal Reasoning in Lean4 through agentic tool-integrated reasoning (TIR). We decompose the native formal reasoning task into three independent formal capabilities, i.e., auto-formalization, sketching, and proving. To facilitate these capabilities, we propose a Hybrid-Experts Iteration Framework to expand high-quality task trajectories, including generating a formal statement based on a given informal problem, producing a whole-proof directly from the statement, or a lemma-style sketch. During agentic RL, we present a Hierarchical Importance Sampling Policy Optimization (HisPO) algorithm, which aims to stabilize the MoE model training on such long-horizon tasks. It employs a gradient masking strategy that accounts for the policy staleness and the inherent train-inference engine discrepancies at both sequence and token levels. Additionally, we also incorporate theorem consistency and legality detection mechanisms to eliminate reward hacking issues. Extensive evaluations show that our LongCat-Flash-Prover sets a new state-of-the-art for open-weights models in both auto-formalization and theorem proving. Demonstrating remarkable sample efficiency, it achieves a 97.1% pass rate on MiniF2F-Test using only 72 inference budget per problem. On more challenging benchmarks, it solves 70.8% of ProverBench and 41.5% of PutnamBench with no more than 220 attempts per problem, significantly outperforming existing open-weights baselines.

Existing indoor layout generators produce globally plausible layouts yet may retain local violations such as collisions, out-of-bounds placements, obstructed openings, and blocked circulation. Most prior work focuses on full-scene synthesis or scene-level optimization, with limited support for identifying responsible objects and locally repairing affected regions. We present Roomer, a reflective repair framework that casts these violations as sparse, object-grounded repair problems. Roomer encodes layouts as ``RoState'' and uses ``RoReview'' to bind measured violations to implicated objects. A geometry-conditioned vision-language model planner proposes a structured local edit, while a deterministic solver validates it and generates a finite set of candidate edits when needed. Each candidate is committed only if full-scene verification confirms that it resolves the target violation without new hard violations or broken protected constraints. We train the planner on Roomer-CC, a controlled-corruption dataset that pairs faulty layouts with object-grounded violation evidence and known-feasible inverse StatePatches. Since existing benchmarks rarely assess whether physically valid layouts are usable, we introduce Roomer-Eval to assess distributional quality, physical validity, and practical usability. Experiments show that Roomer repairs residual violations while preserving valid regions, improves physical validity and usability, and transfers across external generators.

Human reasoning relies on constructing and manipulating mental models-simplified internal representations of situations that we use to understand and solve problems. Conceptual diagrams (for example, sketches drawn by humans to aid reasoning) externalize these mental models, abstracting irrelevant details to efficiently capture relational and spatial information. In contrast, Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) predominantly reason through textual representations, limiting their effectiveness in complex multi-step combinatorial and planning tasks. In this paper, we propose a zero-shot fully automatic framework that enables LMMs to reason through multiple chains of self-generated intermediate conceptual diagrams, significantly enhancing their combinatorial planning capabilities. Our approach does not require any human initialization beyond a natural language description of the task. It integrates both textual and diagrammatic reasoning within an optimized graph-of-thought inference framework, enhanced by beam search and depth-wise backtracking. Evaluated on multiple challenging PDDL planning domains, our method substantially improves GPT-4o's performance (for example, from 35.5% to 90.2% in Blocksworld). On more difficult planning domains with solution depths up to 40, our approach outperforms even the o1-preview reasoning model (for example, over 13% improvement in Parking). These results highlight the value of conceptual diagrams as a complementary reasoning medium in LMMs.

While test-time reasoning enables language models to tackle complex tasks, searching or planning in natural language can be slow, costly, and error-prone. But even when LMs struggle to emulate the precise reasoning steps needed to solve a problem, they often excel at describing its abstract structure--both how to verify solutions and how to search for them. This paper introduces DisCIPL, a method for "self-steering" LMs where a Planner model generates a task-specific inference program that is executed by a population of Follower models. Our approach equips LMs with the ability to write recursive search procedures that guide LM inference, enabling new forms of verifiable and efficient reasoning. When instantiated with a small Follower (e.g., Llama-3.2-1B), DisCIPL matches (and sometimes outperforms) much larger models, including GPT-4o and o1, on challenging constrained generation tasks. In decoupling planning from execution, our work opens up a design space of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo inference strategies that outperform standard best-of-N sampling, require no finetuning, and can be implemented automatically by existing LMs.

In computer-aided design (CAD) systems, 2D line drawings are commonly used to illustrate 3D object designs. To reconstruct the 3D models depicted by a single 2D line drawing, an important key is finding the edge loops in the line drawing which correspond to the actual faces of the 3D object. In this paper, we approach the classical problem of face identification from a novel data-driven point of view. We cast it as a sequence generation problem: starting from an arbitrary edge, we adopt a variant of the popular Transformer model to predict the edges associated with the same face in a natural order. This allows us to avoid searching the space of all possible edge loops with various hand-crafted rules and heuristics as most existing methods do, deal with challenging cases such as curved surfaces and nested edge loops, and leverage additional cues such as face types. We further discuss how possibly imperfect predictions can be used for 3D object reconstruction.

While large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong potential in solving planning problems, there is a trade-off between flexibility and complexity. LLMs, as zero-shot planners themselves, are still not capable of directly generating valid plans for complex planning problems such as multi-constraint or long-horizon tasks. On the other hand, many frameworks aiming to solve complex planning problems often rely on task-specific preparatory efforts, such as task-specific in-context examples and pre-defined critics/verifiers, which limits their cross-task generalization capability. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by observing that the core of many planning problems lies in optimization problems: searching for the optimal solution (best plan) with goals subject to constraints (preconditions and effects of decisions). With LLMs' commonsense, reasoning, and programming capabilities, this opens up the possibilities of a universal LLM-based approach to planning problems. Inspired by this observation, we propose LLMFP, a general-purpose framework that leverages LLMs to capture key information from planning problems and formally formulate and solve them as optimization problems from scratch, with no task-specific examples needed. We apply LLMFP to 9 planning problems, ranging from multi-constraint decision making to multi-step planning problems, and demonstrate that LLMFP achieves on average 83.7% and 86.8% optimal rate across 9 tasks for GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming the best baseline (direct planning with OpenAI o1-preview) with 37.6% and 40.7% improvements. We also validate components of LLMFP with ablation experiments and analyzed the underlying success and failure reasons.

Sparse roadmaps are important to compactly represent state spaces, to determine problems to be infeasible and to terminate in finite time. However, sparse roadmaps do not scale well to high-dimensional planning problems. In prior work, we showed improved planning performance on high-dimensional planning problems by using multilevel abstractions to simplify state spaces. In this work, we generalize sparse roadmaps to multilevel abstractions by developing a novel algorithm, the sparse multilevel roadmap planner (SMLR). To this end, we represent multilevel abstractions using the language of fiber bundles, and generalize sparse roadmap planners by using the concept of restriction sampling with visibility regions. We argue SMLR to be probabilistically complete and asymptotically near-optimal by inheritance from sparse roadmap planners. In evaluations, we outperform sparse roadmap planners on challenging planning problems, in particular problems which are high-dimensional, contain narrow passages or are infeasible. We thereby demonstrate sparse multilevel roadmaps as an efficient tool for feasible and infeasible high-dimensional planning problems.

We introduce a new method of generating Computer Aided Design (CAD) profiles via a sequence of simple geometric constructions including curve offsetting, rotations and intersections. These sequences start with geometry provided by a designer and build up the points and curves of the final profile step by step. We demonstrate that adding construction steps between the designer's input geometry and the final profile improves generation quality in a similar way to the introduction of a chain of thought in language models. Similar to the constraints in a parametric CAD model, the construction sequences reduce the degrees of freedom in the modeled shape to a small set of parameter values which can be adjusted by the designer, allowing parametric editing with the constructed geometry evaluated to floating point precision. In addition we show that applying reinforcement learning to the construction sequences gives further improvements over a wide range of metrics, including some which were not explicitly optimized.

Reasoning methods such as chain-of-thought prompting and self-consistency have shown immense potential to improve the accuracy of large language models across various reasoning tasks. However such methods involve generation of lengthy reasoning chains, which substantially increases token consumption, computational cost, and latency. To address this inefficiency, we propose ProofSketch, a verification-guided reasoning framework that integrates symbolic closure computation, lexicographic verification and adaptive sketch generation. Our experiments show that ProofSketch consistently reduces token usage while improving accuracy, demonstrating that this approach offers a promising path for efficient and trustworthy reasoning.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, but their effectiveness in planning remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluate the planning capabilities of OpenAI's o1 models across a variety of benchmark tasks, focusing on three key aspects: feasibility, optimality, and generalizability. Through empirical evaluations on constraint-heavy tasks (e.g., Barman, Tyreworld) and spatially complex environments (e.g., Termes, Floortile), we highlight o1-preview's strengths in self-evaluation and constraint-following, while also identifying bottlenecks in decision-making and memory management, particularly in tasks requiring robust spatial reasoning. Our results reveal that o1-preview outperforms GPT-4 in adhering to task constraints and managing state transitions in structured environments. However, the model often generates suboptimal solutions with redundant actions and struggles to generalize effectively in spatially complex tasks. This pilot study provides foundational insights into the planning limitations of LLMs, offering key directions for future research on improving memory management, decision-making, and generalization in LLM-based planning. Code available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/o1-planning.

As textual reasoning with large language models (LLMs) has advanced significantly, there has been growing interest in enhancing the multimodal reasoning capabilities of large vision-language models (LVLMs). However, existing methods primarily approach multimodal reasoning in a straightforward, text-centric manner, where both reasoning and answer derivation are conducted purely through text, with the only difference being the presence of multimodal input. As a result, these methods often encounter fundamental limitations in spatial reasoning tasks that demand precise geometric understanding and continuous spatial tracking-capabilities that humans achieve through mental visualization and manipulation. To address the limitations, we propose drawing to reason in space, a novel paradigm that enables LVLMs to reason through elementary drawing operations in the visual space. By equipping models with basic drawing operations, including annotating bounding boxes and drawing auxiliary lines, we empower them to express and analyze spatial relationships through direct visual manipulation, meanwhile avoiding the performance ceiling imposed by specialized perception tools in previous tool-integrated reasoning approaches. To cultivate this capability, we develop a three-stage training framework: cold-start training with synthetic data to establish basic drawing abilities, reflective rejection sampling to enhance self-reflection behaviors, and reinforcement learning to directly optimize for target rewards. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model, named VILASR, consistently outperforms existing methods across diverse spatial reasoning benchmarks, involving maze navigation, static spatial reasoning, video-based reasoning, and multi-view-based reasoning tasks, with an average improvement of 18.4%.

Planning is a fundamental property of human intelligence. Reasoning about asynchronous plans is challenging since it requires sequential and parallel planning to optimize time costs. Can large language models (LLMs) succeed at this task? Here, we present the first large-scale study investigating this question. We find that a representative set of closed and open-source LLMs, including GPT-4 and LLaMA-2, behave poorly when not supplied with illustrations about the task-solving process in our benchmark AsyncHow. We propose a novel technique called Plan Like a Graph (PLaG) that combines graphs with natural language prompts and achieves state-of-the-art results. We show that although PLaG can boost model performance, LLMs still suffer from drastic degradation when task complexity increases, highlighting the limits of utilizing LLMs for simulating digital devices. We see our study as an exciting step towards using LLMs as efficient autonomous agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fangru-lin/graph-llm-asynchow-plan.

We introduce MentalThink, a visual-symbolic reasoning paradigm that equips Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with an executable mechanism for "mental" visualization. The core of MentalThink is a think-with-SVG pipeline, where the model learns to generate, render, and interpret scalable vector graphics (SVG) code as an intermediate visual representation for multi-turn reasoning. By creating structured vector sketches, the model can externalize spatial hypotheses, inspect them through deterministic rendering, and reason within a constrained geometric space, effectively mimicking the human process of mental imagery. We instantiate this paradigm through a two-stage training framework, combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for SVG syntactic alignment with multi-turn Reinforcement Learning (RL) to encourage iterative inspection, revision, and refinement of intermediate visual hypotheses. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MentalThink achieves superior performance on spatial understanding and reasoning benchmarks (e.g., 55.1% on VSIBench, 76.0% on MindCube), showing that executable vector graphics provide a verifiable visual workspace for dynamic perspective taking, visual reflection, and compositional scene construction.

Planning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) because such complex tasks require models to coordinate goals, constraints, resources, and long-term consequences into executable and verifiable solutions. Existing planning benchmarks, however, usually treat planning data as fixed collections of instances rather than controllable generation targets. This limits scenario coverage, ties difficulty to surface-level proxies rather than structural sources, and offers limited support for scalable generation, automatic verification, or planning-oriented training. We introduce PlanningBench, a framework for generating scalable, diverse, and verifiable planning data for both evaluation and training. PlanningBench starts from real planning scenarios and abstracts practical workflows into a structured taxonomy of more than 30 task types, subtasks, constraint families, and difficulty factors. Guided by this taxonomy, a constraint-driven synthesis pipeline instantiates self-contained planning problems with adaptive difficulty control, quality filtering, and instance-level verification checklists. This shifts planning data construction from fixed benchmark collection to controllable generation while preserving realistic task grounding. We use PlanningBench to evaluate open-source and closed-source frontier LLMs, and find that current models still struggle to produce complete solutions under coupled constraints. Beyond evaluation, reinforcement learning on verified PlanningBench data improves performance on unseen planning benchmarks and broader instruction-following tasks. Further analysis suggests that determinate or well-specified optimal solutions provide clearer reward signals and more stable training dynamics. Overall, PlanningBench provides a controllable source of planning data for diagnosing and improving generalizable planning abilities in LLMs.

Humans paint images incrementally: they plan a global layout, sketch a coarse draft, inspect, and refine details, and most importantly, each step is grounded in the evolving visual states. However, can unified multimodal models trained on text-image interleaved datasets also imagine the chain of intermediate states? In this paper, we introduce process-driven image generation, a multi-step paradigm that decomposes synthesis into an interleaved reasoning trajectory of thoughts and actions. Rather than generating images in a single step, our approach unfolds across multiple iterations, each consisting of 4 stages: textual planning, visual drafting, textual reflection, and visual refinement. The textual reasoning explicitly conditions how the visual state should evolve, while the generated visual intermediate in turn constrains and grounds the next round of textual reasoning. A core challenge of process-driven generation stems from the ambiguity of intermediate states: how can models evaluate each partially-complete image? We address this through dense, step-wise supervision that maintains two complementary constraints: for the visual intermediate states, we enforce the spatial and semantic consistency; for the textual intermediate states, we preserve the prior visual knowledge while enabling the model to identify and correct prompt-violating elements. This makes the generation process explicit, interpretable, and directly supervisable. To validate proposed method, we conduct experiments under various text-to-image generation benchmarks.

Recent advances in vision-language models have facilitated progress in sketch generation. However, existing specialized methods primarily focus on generic synthesis and lack mechanisms for precise control over sketch styles. In this work, we propose a training-free framework based on diffusion models that enables explicit style guidance via textual prompts and referenced style sketches. Unlike previous style transfer methods that overwrite key and value matrices in self-attention, we incorporate the reference features as auxiliary information with linear smoothing and leverage a style-content guidance mechanism. This design effectively reduces content leakage from reference sketches and enhances synthesis quality, especially in cases with low structural similarity between reference and target sketches. Furthermore, we extend our framework to support controllable multi-style generation by integrating features from multiple reference sketches, coordinated via a joint AdaIN module. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves high-quality sketch generation with accurate style alignment and improved flexibility in style control. The official implementation of M3S is available at https://github.com/CMACH508/M3S.

In this work, we introduce CAD-Coder, a novel framework that reformulates text-to-CAD as the generation of CadQuery scripts - a Python-based, parametric CAD language. This representation enables direct geometric validation, a richer modeling vocabulary, and seamless integration with existing LLMs. To further enhance code validity and geometric fidelity, we propose a two-stage learning pipeline: (1) supervised fine-tuning on paired text-CadQuery data, and (2) reinforcement learning with Group Reward Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by a CAD-specific reward comprising both a geometric reward (Chamfer Distance) and a format reward. We also introduce a chain-of-thought (CoT) planning process to improve model reasoning, and construct a large-scale, high-quality dataset of 110K text-CadQuery-3D model triplets and 1.5K CoT samples via an automated pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CAD-Coder enables LLMs to generate diverse, valid, and complex CAD models directly from natural language, advancing the state of the art of text-to-CAD generation and geometric reasoning.

Enabling robots to execute long-horizon manipulation tasks from free-form language instructions remains a fundamental challenge in embodied AI. While vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promise as high-level planners, their deployment in the real world is hindered by two gaps: (i) the scarcity of large-scale, sequential manipulation data that couples natural language with multi-step action plans, and (ii) the absence of dense, interpretable rewards for fine-tuning VLMs on planning objectives. To address these issues, we propose REVER, a framework that empowers VLMs to generate and validate long-horizon manipulation plans from natural language instructions in real-world scenarios. Under REVER we train and release RoboFarseer, a VLM incentivized to emit chain-of-thought that perform temporal and spatial reasoning, ensuring physically plausible and logically coherent plans. To obtain training data, we leverage the Universal Manipulation Interface framework to capture hardware-agnostic demonstrations of atomic skills. An automated annotation engine converts each demonstration into vision-instruction-plan triplet. We introduce a verifiable reward that scores the generated plan by its ordered bipartite matching overlap with the ground-truth skill sequence. At run time, the fine-tuned VLM functions both as a planner and as a monitor, verifying step-wise completion. RoboFarseer matches or exceeds the performance of proprietary models that are orders of magnitude larger, while on open-ended planning it surpasses the best baseline by more than 40%. In real-world, long-horizon tasks, the complete system boosts overall success by roughly 60% compared with the same low-level controller without the planner. We will open-source both the dataset and the trained model upon publication.

Embodied agents have achieved prominent performance in following human instructions to complete tasks. However, the potential of providing instructions informed by texts and images to assist humans in completing tasks remains underexplored. To uncover this capability, we present the multimodal procedural planning (MPP) task, in which models are given a high-level goal and generate plans of paired text-image steps, providing more complementary and informative guidance than unimodal plans. The key challenges of MPP are to ensure the informativeness, temporal coherence,and accuracy of plans across modalities. To tackle this, we propose Text-Image Prompting (TIP), a dual-modality prompting method that jointly leverages zero-shot reasoning ability in large language models (LLMs) and compelling text-to-image generation ability from diffusion-based models. TIP improves the interaction in the dual modalities using Text-to-Image Bridge and Image-to-Text Bridge, allowing LLMs to guide the textual-grounded image plan generation and leveraging the descriptions of image plans to ground the textual plan reversely. To address the lack of relevant datasets, we collect WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN as a testbed for MPP. Our results show compelling human preferences and automatic scores against unimodal and multimodal baselines on WIKIPLAN and RECIPEPLAN in terms of informativeness, temporal coherence, and plan accuracy. Our code and data: https://github.com/YujieLu10/MPP.

Efficiently tackling combinatorial reasoning problems, particularly the notorious NP-hard tasks, remains a significant challenge for AI research. Recent efforts have sought to enhance planning by incorporating hierarchical high-level search strategies, known as subgoal methods. While promising, their performance against traditional low-level planners is inconsistent, raising questions about their application contexts. In this study, we conduct an in-depth exploration of subgoal-planning methods for combinatorial reasoning. We identify the attributes pivotal for leveraging the advantages of high-level search: hard-to-learn value functions, complex action spaces, presence of dead ends in the environment, or using data collected from diverse experts. We propose a consistent evaluation methodology to achieve meaningful comparisons between methods and reevaluate the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models have sparked interest in their potential for robotic task planning. While these models demonstrate strong generative capabilities, their effectiveness in producing structured and executable plans remains uncertain. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of a broad spectrum of current state of the art language models, each directly prompted using Planning Domain Definition Language domain and problem files, and compares their planning performance with the Fast Downward planner across a variety of benchmarks. In addition to measuring success rates, we assess how faithfully the generated plans translate into sequences of actions that can actually be executed, identifying both strengths and limitations of using these models in this setting. Our findings show that while the models perform well on simpler planning tasks, they continue to struggle with more complex scenarios that require precise resource management, consistent state tracking, and strict constraint compliance. These results underscore fundamental challenges in applying language models to robotic planning in real world environments. By outlining the gaps that emerge during execution, we aim to guide future research toward combined approaches that integrate language models with classical planners in order to enhance the reliability and scalability of planning in autonomous robotics.

Recent research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advancements in general NLP AI assistants. Some studies have further explored the use of LLMs for planning and invoking models or APIs to address more general multi-modal user queries. Despite this progress, complex visual-based tasks still remain challenging due to the diverse nature of visual tasks. This diversity is reflected in two aspects: 1) Reasoning paths. For many real-life applications, it is hard to accurately decompose a query simply by examining the query itself. Planning based on the specific visual content and the results of each step is usually required. 2) Flexible inputs and intermediate results. Input forms could be flexible for in-the-wild cases, and involves not only a single image or video but a mixture of videos and images, e.g., a user-view image with some reference videos. Besides, a complex reasoning process will also generate diverse multimodal intermediate results, e.g., video narrations, segmented video clips, etc. To address such general cases, we propose a multi-modal AI assistant, AssistGPT, with an interleaved code and language reasoning approach called Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learn (PEIL) to integrate LLMs with various tools. Specifically, the Planner is capable of using natural language to plan which tool in Executor should do next based on the current reasoning progress. Inspector is an efficient memory manager to assist the Planner to feed proper visual information into a specific tool. Finally, since the entire reasoning process is complex and flexible, a Learner is designed to enable the model to autonomously explore and discover the optimal solution. We conducted experiments on A-OKVQA and NExT-QA benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Moreover, showcases demonstrate the ability of our system to handle questions far more complex than those found in the benchmarks.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their ability to perform structured symbolic planning remains limited, particularly in domains requiring formal representations like the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). In this paper, we present a novel instruction tuning framework, PDDL-Instruct, designed to enhance LLMs' symbolic planning capabilities through logical chain-of-thought reasoning. Our approach focuses on teaching models to rigorously reason about action applicability, state transitions, and plan validity using explicit logical inference steps. By developing instruction prompts that guide models through the precise logical reasoning required to determine when actions can be applied in a given state, we enable LLMs to self-correct their planning processes through structured reflection. The framework systematically builds verification skills by decomposing the planning process into explicit reasoning chains about precondition satisfaction, effect application, and invariant preservation. Experimental results on multiple planning domains show that our chain-of-thought reasoning based instruction-tuned models are significantly better at planning, achieving planning accuracy of up to 94% on standard benchmarks, representing a 66% absolute improvement over baseline models. This work bridges the gap between the general reasoning capabilities of LLMs and the logical precision required for automated planning, offering a promising direction for developing better AI planning systems.

Sketching provides an intuitive way to convey dynamic intent in animation authoring (i.e., how elements change over time and space), making it a natural medium for automatic content creation. Yet existing approaches often constrain sketches to fixed command tokens or predefined visual forms, overlooking their freeform nature and the central role of humans in shaping intention. To address this, we introduce an interaction paradigm where users convey dynamic intent to a vision-language model via free-form sketching, instantiated here in a sketch storyboard to motion graphics workflow. We implement an interface and improve it through a three-stage study with 24 participants. The study shows how sketches convey motion with minimal input, how their inherent ambiguity requires users to be involved for clarification, and how sketches can visually guide video refinement. Our findings reveal the potential of sketch and AI interaction to bridge the gap between intention and outcome, and demonstrate its applicability to 3D animation and video generation.

Building AI systems that can plan, act, and create in the physical world requires more than pattern recognition. Such systems must understand the causal mechanisms and constraints governing physical processes in order to guide sequential decisions. This capability relies on internal representations, analogous to an internal language model, that relate observations, actions, and resulting environmental changes. However, many existing benchmarks treat visual perception and programmatic reasoning as separate problems, focusing either on visual recognition or on symbolic tasks. The domain of origami provides a natural testbed that integrates these modalities. Constructing shapes through folding operations requires visual perception, reasoning about geometric and physical constraints, and sequential planning, while remaining sufficiently structured for systematic evaluation. We introduce OrigamiBench, an interactive benchmark in which models iteratively propose folds and receive feedback on physical validity and similarity to a target configuration. Experiments with modern vision-language models show that scaling model size alone does not reliably produce causal reasoning about physical transformations. Models fail to generate coherent multi-step folding strategies, suggesting that visual and language representations remain weakly integrated.

Automating formal proofs of combinatorial identities is challenging for LLM-based provers, as long-horizon proof planning is required and unconstrained search quickly explodes. Symbolic methods such as the Wilf-Zeilberger (WZ) method can achieve a mechanized proof of combinatorial identities by constructing special auxiliary functions and demonstrating that they satisfy specific recurrence relations. We propose WZ-LLM, a neuro-symbolic framework that turns WZ proof plans into executable proof sketches in Lean 4 and uses an LLM-based prover to discharge the resulting machine-checkable subgoals. We also train a dedicated WZ-Prover via a Lean-kernel-verified bootstrapping loop with expert-verified iteration, followed by DAPO-based refinement. Experiments show that WZ-LLM achieves a 34% proof success rate on LCI-Test (100 classic combinatorial identities), outperforming strong baselines such as DeepSeek-V3 and Goedel-Prover-V2, and delivering consistent gains on CombiBench and PutnamBench-Comb. These results indicate that our framework provides two complementary strengths: improved direct proving for identities beyond the scope of WZ, and substantially higher end-to-end success when WZ sketches guide a specialized prover.

Procedural planning, which entails decomposing a high-level goal into a sequence of temporally ordered steps, is an important yet intricate task for machines. It involves integrating common-sense knowledge to reason about complex contextualized situations that are often counterfactual, e.g. "scheduling a doctor's appointment without a phone". While current approaches show encouraging results using large language models (LLMs), they are hindered by drawbacks such as costly API calls and reproducibility issues. In this paper, we advocate planning using smaller language models. We present PlaSma, a novel two-pronged approach to endow small language models with procedural knowledge and (counterfactual) planning capabilities. More concretely, we develop symbolic procedural knowledge distillation to enhance the implicit knowledge in small language models and an inference-time algorithm to facilitate more structured and accurate reasoning. In addition, we introduce a novel task, Counterfactual Planning, that requires a revision of a plan to cope with a counterfactual situation. In both the original and counterfactual setting, we show that orders-of-magnitude smaller models (770M-11B parameters) can compete and often surpass their larger teacher models' capabilities.

As sketch research has collectively matured over time, its adaptation for at-mass commercialisation emerges on the immediate horizon. Despite an already mature research endeavour for photos, there is no research on the efficient inference specifically designed for sketch data. In this paper, we first demonstrate existing state-of-the-art efficient light-weight models designed for photos do not work on sketches. We then propose two sketch-specific components which work in a plug-n-play manner on any photo efficient network to adapt them to work on sketch data. We specifically chose fine-grained sketch-based image retrieval (FG-SBIR) as a demonstrator as the most recognised sketch problem with immediate commercial value. Technically speaking, we first propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation network to transfer existing photo efficient networks to be compatible with sketch, which brings down number of FLOPs and model parameters by 97.96% percent and 84.89% respectively. We then exploit the abstract trait of sketch to introduce a RL-based canvas selector that dynamically adjusts to the abstraction level which further cuts down number of FLOPs by two thirds. The end result is an overall reduction of 99.37% of FLOPs (from 40.18G to 0.254G) when compared with a full network, while retaining the accuracy (33.03% vs 32.77%) -- finally making an efficient network for the sparse sketch data that exhibit even fewer FLOPs than the best photo counterpart.

LLM-as-a-Judge models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) sequences intended to capture the step-bystep reasoning process that underlies the final evaluation of a response. However, due to the lack of human annotated CoTs for evaluation, the required components and structure of effective reasoning traces remain understudied. Consequently, previous approaches often (1) constrain reasoning traces to hand-designed components, such as a list of criteria, reference answers, or verification questions and (2) structure them such that planning is intertwined with the reasoning for evaluation. In this work, we propose EvalPlanner, a preference optimization algorithm for Thinking-LLM-as-a-Judge that first generates an unconstrained evaluation plan, followed by its execution, and then the final judgment. In a self-training loop, EvalPlanner iteratively optimizes over synthetically constructed evaluation plans and executions, leading to better final verdicts. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance for generative reward models on RewardBench (with a score of 93.9), despite being trained on fewer amount of, and synthetically generated, preference pairs. Additional experiments on other benchmarks like RM-Bench, JudgeBench, and FollowBenchEval further highlight the utility of both planning and reasoning for building robust LLM-as-a-Judge reasoning models.

Vision-Language Models have excelled at textual reasoning, but they often struggle with fine-grained spatial understanding and continuous action planning, failing to simulate the dynamics required for complex visual reasoning. In this work, we formulate visual reasoning by means of video generation models, positing that generated frames can act as intermediate reasoning steps between initial states and solutions. We evaluate their capacity in two distinct regimes: Maze Navigation for sequential discrete planning with low visual change and Tangram Puzzle for continuous manipulation with high visual change. Our experiments reveal three critical insights: (1) Robust Zero-Shot Generalization: In both tasks, the model demonstrates strong performance on unseen data distributions without specific finetuning. (2) Visual Context: The model effectively uses visual context as explicit control, such as agent icons and tangram shapes, enabling it to maintain high visual consistency and adapt its planning capability robustly to unseen patterns. (3) Visual Test-Time Scaling: We observe a test-time scaling law in sequential planning; increasing the generated video length (visual inference budget) empowers better zero-shot generalization to spatially and temporally complex paths. These findings suggest that video generation is not merely a media tool, but a scalable, generalizable paradigm for visual reasoning.

VR sketching lets users explore and iterate on ideas directly in 3D, offering a faster and more intuitive alternative to conventional CAD tools. However, existing sketch-to-shape models ignore the temporal ordering of strokes, discarding crucial cues about structure and design intent. We introduce VRSketch2Shape, the first framework and multi-category dataset for generating 3D shapes from sequential VR sketches. Our contributions are threefold: (i) an automated pipeline that generates sequential VR sketches from arbitrary shapes, (ii) a dataset of over 20k synthetic and 900 hand-drawn sketch-shape pairs across four categories, and (iii) an order-aware sketch encoder coupled with a diffusion-based 3D generator. Our approach yields higher geometric fidelity than prior work, generalizes effectively from synthetic to real sketches with minimal supervision, and performs well even on partial sketches. All data and models will be released open-source at https://chenyizi086.github.io/VRSketch2Shape_website.

This paper introduces H-MaP, a hybrid sequential manipulation planner that addresses complex tasks requiring both sequential actions and dynamic contact mode switches. Our approach reduces configuration space dimensionality by decoupling object trajectory planning from manipulation planning through object-based waypoint generation, informed contact sampling, and optimization-based motion planning. This architecture enables handling of challenging scenarios involving tool use, auxiliary object manipulation, and bimanual coordination. Experimental results across seven diverse tasks demonstrate H-MaP's superior performance compared to existing methods, particularly in highly constrained environments where traditional approaches fail due to local minima or scalability issues. The planner's effectiveness is validated through both simulation and real-robot experiments.

We propose a method for scene-level sketch-to-photo synthesis with text guidance. Although object-level sketch-to-photo synthesis has been widely studied, whole-scene synthesis is still challenging without reference photos that adequately reflect the target style. To this end, we leverage knowledge from recent large-scale pre-trained generative models, resulting in text-guided sketch-to-photo synthesis without the need for reference images. To train our model, we use self-supervised learning from a set of photographs. Specifically, we use a pre-trained edge detector that maps both color and sketch images into a standardized edge domain, which reduces the gap between photograph-based edge images (during training) and hand-drawn sketch images (during inference). We implement our method by fine-tuning a latent diffusion model (i.e., Stable Diffusion) with sketch and text conditions. Experiments show that the proposed method translates original sketch images that are not extracted from color images into photos with compelling visual quality.

Image generation models have evolved from text-conditioned pixel synthesis toward multimodal agents endowed with visual comprehension and tool invocation capabilities. Yet, existing agents remain at the mercy of underlying black-box image models. Their workflow is trapped in a repetitive cycle of prompt rewriting for generation refinement, leaving them with no mechanism to directly manipulate the canvas. In essence, the potential of LLMs to serve as a genuine "brush" for precise visual construction remains largely untapped. In this paper, we propose GenClaw, a code-driven agentic image generation paradigm that empowers the agent to create like a human artist: first conceptualizing, then sketching, and finally coloring. Specifically, the agent first constructs the conceptual knowledge and context through search and reasoning. It then utilizes code (e.g., SVG, HTML, Three.js) to render executable visual sketches. Finally, it employs an image generation model to supplement textures, materials, and photorealism. In this workflow, code serves as a controllable intermediate canvas bridging linguistic reasoning and pixel synthesis, seamlessly integrating programmatic logic with the visual expressiveness of generative models. By transforming image generation from a black-box paradigm into a staged process akin to authentic human creation, GenClaw offers a step toward for highly controllable and interpretable visual generation systems.

Domain-independent heuristics have long been a cornerstone of AI planning, offering general solutions applicable across a wide range of tasks without requiring domain-specific engineering. However, the advent of large language models (LLMs) presents an opportunity to generate heuristics tailored to specific planning problems, potentially challenging the necessity of domain independence as a strict design principle. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to automatically derive planning heuristics from task descriptions represented as successor generators and goal tests written in general purpose programming language. We investigate the trade-offs between domain-specific LLM-generated heuristics and traditional domain-independent methods in terms of computational efficiency and explainability. Our experiments demonstrate that LLMs can create heuristics that achieve state-of-the-art performance on some standard IPC domains, as well as their ability to solve problems that lack an adequate Planning Domain Definition Language ({\sc pddl}) representation. We discuss whether these results signify a paradigm shift and how they can complement existing approaches.

There is considerable confusion about the role of Large Language Models (LLMs) in planning and reasoning tasks. On one side are over-optimistic claims that LLMs can indeed do these tasks with just the right prompting or self-verification strategies. On the other side are perhaps over-pessimistic claims that all that LLMs are good for in planning/reasoning tasks are as mere translators of the problem specification from one syntactic format to another, and ship the problem off to external symbolic solvers. In this position paper, we take the view that both these extremes are misguided. We argue that auto-regressive LLMs cannot, by themselves, do planning or self-verification (which is after all a form of reasoning), and shed some light on the reasons for misunderstandings in the literature. We will also argue that LLMs should be viewed as universal approximate knowledge sources that have much more meaningful roles to play in planning/reasoning tasks beyond simple front-end/back-end format translators. We present a vision of {\bf LLM-Modulo Frameworks} that combine the strengths of LLMs with external model-based verifiers in a tighter bi-directional interaction regime. We will show how the models driving the external verifiers themselves can be acquired with the help of LLMs. We will also argue that rather than simply pipelining LLMs and symbolic components, this LLM-Modulo Framework provides a better neuro-symbolic approach that offers tighter integration between LLMs and symbolic components, and allows extending the scope of model-based planning/reasoning regimes towards more flexible knowledge, problem and preference specifications.

3D shape modeling is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and requires years of expertise. To facilitate 3D shape modeling, we propose a 3D shape generation network that takes a 3D VR sketch as a condition. We assume that sketches are created by novices without art training and aim to reconstruct geometrically realistic 3D shapes of a given category. To handle potential sketch ambiguity, our method creates multiple 3D shapes that align with the original sketch's structure. We carefully design our method, training the model step-by-step and leveraging multi-modal 3D shape representation to support training with limited training data. To guarantee the realism of generated 3D shapes we leverage the normalizing flow that models the distribution of the latent space of 3D shapes. To encourage the fidelity of the generated 3D shapes to an input sketch, we propose a dedicated loss that we deploy at different stages of the training process. The code is available at https://github.com/Rowl1ng/3Dsketch2shape.

In our pursuit of advancing multi-modal AI assistants capable of guiding users to achieve complex multi-step goals, we propose the task of "Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA)". Given a succinct natural language goal, e.g., "make a shelf", and a video of the user's progress so far, the aim of VPA is to devise a plan, i.e., a sequence of actions such as "sand shelf", "paint shelf", etc. to realize the specified goal. This requires assessing the user's progress from the (untrimmed) video, and relating it to the requirements of natural language goal, i.e., which actions to select and in what order? Consequently, this requires handling long video history and arbitrarily complex action dependencies. To address these challenges, we decompose VPA into video action segmentation and forecasting. Importantly, we experiment by formulating the forecasting step as a multi-modal sequence modeling problem, allowing us to leverage the strength of pre-trained LMs (as the sequence model). This novel approach, which we call Visual Language Model based Planner (VLaMP), outperforms baselines across a suite of metrics that gauge the quality of the generated plans. Furthermore, through comprehensive ablations, we also isolate the value of each component--language pre-training, visual observations, and goal information. We have open-sourced all the data, model checkpoints, and training code.

Modeling 3D avatars benefits various application scenarios such as AR/VR, gaming, and filming. Character faces contribute significant diversity and vividity as a vital component of avatars. However, building 3D character face models usually requires a heavy workload with commercial tools, even for experienced artists. Various existing sketch-based tools fail to support amateurs in modeling diverse facial shapes and rich geometric details. In this paper, we present SketchMetaFace - a sketching system targeting amateur users to model high-fidelity 3D faces in minutes. We carefully design both the user interface and the underlying algorithm. First, curvature-aware strokes are adopted to better support the controllability of carving facial details. Second, considering the key problem of mapping a 2D sketch map to a 3D model, we develop a novel learning-based method termed "Implicit and Depth Guided Mesh Modeling" (IDGMM). It fuses the advantages of mesh, implicit, and depth representations to achieve high-quality results with high efficiency. In addition, to further support usability, we present a coarse-to-fine 2D sketching interface design and a data-driven stroke suggestion tool. User studies demonstrate the superiority of our system over existing modeling tools in terms of the ease to use and visual quality of results. Experimental analyses also show that IDGMM reaches a better trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. SketchMetaFace are available at https://zhongjinluo.github.io/SketchMetaFace/.

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) present a promising non-sequential paradigm for text generation, distinct from standard autoregressive (AR) approaches. However, current decoding strategies often adopt a reactive stance, underutilizing the global bidirectional context to dictate global trajectories. To address this, we propose Plan-Verify-Fill (PVF), a training-free paradigm that grounds planning via quantitative validation. PVF actively constructs a hierarchical skeleton by prioritizing high-leverage semantic anchors and employs a verification protocol to operationalize pragmatic structural stopping where further deliberation yields diminishing returns. Extensive evaluations on LLaDA-8B-Instruct and Dream-7B-Instruct demonstrate that PVF reduces the Number of Function Evaluations (NFE) by up to 65% compared to confidence-based parallel decoding across benchmark datasets, unlocking superior efficiency without compromising accuracy.

In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requires precise and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of the tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider the proximity to the current agent when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient. To this end, we propose "Describe, Explain, Plan and Select" (DEPS), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach helps with better error correction from the feedback during the long-haul planning, while also bringing the sense of proximity via goal Selector, a learnable module that ranks parallel sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion and improves the original plan accordingly. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly doubles the overall performances. Finally, the ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the ObtainDiamond grand challenge with our approach. The code is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MC-Planner.

We revisit the well-studied problem of approximating a matrix product, A^TB, based on small space sketches S(A) and S(B) of A in R^{n times d} and Bin R^{n times m}. We are interested in the setting where the sketches must be computed independently of each other, except for the use of a shared random seed. We prove that, when A and B are sparse, methods based on coordinated random sampling can outperform classical linear sketching approaches, like Johnson-Lindenstrauss Projection or CountSketch. For example, to obtain Frobenius norm error epsilon|A|_F|B|_F, coordinated sampling requires sketches of size O(s/epsilon^2) when A and B have at most s leq d,m non-zeros per row. In contrast, linear sketching leads to sketches of size O(d/epsilon^2) and O(m/epsilon^2) for A and B. We empirically evaluate our approach on two applications: 1) distributed linear regression in databases, a problem motivated by tasks like dataset discovery and augmentation, and 2) approximating attention matrices in transformer-based language models. In both cases, our sampling algorithms yield an order of magnitude improvement over linear sketching.

There has been considerable divergence of opinion on the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While the initial optimism that reasoning might emerge automatically with scale has been tempered thanks to a slew of counterexamples, a wide spread belief in their iterative self-critique capabilities persists. In this paper, we set out to systematically investigate the effectiveness of iterative prompting of LLMs in the context of Graph Coloring, a canonical NP-complete reasoning problem that is related to propositional satisfiability as well as practical problems like scheduling and allocation. We present a principled empirical study of the performance of GPT4 in solving graph coloring instances or verifying the correctness of candidate colorings. In iterative modes, we experiment with the model critiquing its own answers and an external correct reasoner verifying proposed solutions. In both cases, we analyze whether the content of the criticisms actually affects bottom line performance. The study seems to indicate that (i) LLMs are bad at solving graph coloring instances (ii) they are no better at verifying a solution--and thus are not effective in iterative modes with LLMs critiquing LLM-generated solutions (iii) the correctness and content of the criticisms--whether by LLMs or external solvers--seems largely irrelevant to the performance of iterative prompting. We show that the observed increase in effectiveness is largely due to the correct solution being fortuitously present in the top-k completions of the prompt (and being recognized as such by an external verifier). Our results thus call into question claims about the self-critiquing capabilities of state of the art LLMs.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) models are defined by their construction history: a parametric recipe that encodes design intent. However, existing large-scale 3D datasets predominantly consist of boundary representations (B-Reps) or meshes, stripping away this critical procedural information. To address this scarcity, we introduce Zero-to-CAD, a scalable framework for synthesizing executable CAD construction sequences. We frame synthesis as an agentic search problem: by embedding a large language model (LLM) within a feedback-driven CAD environment, our system iteratively generates, executes, and validates code using tools and documentation lookup to promote geometric validity and operation diversity. This agentic approach enables the synthesis of approximately one million executable, readable, editable CAD sequences, covering a rich vocabulary of operations beyond sketch-and-extrude workflows. We also release a curated subset of 100,000 high-quality models selected for geometric diversity. To demonstrate the dataset's utility, we fine-tune a vision-language model on our synthetic data to reconstruct editable CAD programs from multi-view images, outperforming strong baselines, including GPT-5.2, and effectively bootstrapping sequence generation capabilities without real construction-history training data. Zero-to-CAD bridges the gap between geometric scale and parametric interpretability, offering a vital resource for the next generation of CAD AI.

We propose SketchINR, to advance the representation of vector sketches with implicit neural models. A variable length vector sketch is compressed into a latent space of fixed dimension that implicitly encodes the underlying shape as a function of time and strokes. The learned function predicts the xy point coordinates in a sketch at each time and stroke. Despite its simplicity, SketchINR outperforms existing representations at multiple tasks: (i) Encoding an entire sketch dataset into a fixed size latent vector, SketchINR gives 60times and 10times data compression over raster and vector sketches, respectively. (ii) SketchINR's auto-decoder provides a much higher-fidelity representation than other learned vector sketch representations, and is uniquely able to scale to complex vector sketches such as FS-COCO. (iii) SketchINR supports parallelisation that can decode/render sim100times faster than other learned vector representations such as SketchRNN. (iv) SketchINR, for the first time, emulates the human ability to reproduce a sketch with varying abstraction in terms of number and complexity of strokes. As a first look at implicit sketches, SketchINR's compact high-fidelity representation will support future work in modelling long and complex sketches.

This paper studies close-loop task planning, which refers to the process of generating a sequence of skills (a plan) to accomplish a specific goal while adapting the plan based on real-time observations. Recently, prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate actions iteratively has become a prevalent paradigm due to its superior performance and user-friendliness. However, this paradigm is plagued by two inefficiencies: high token consumption and redundant error correction, both of which hinder its scalability for large-scale testing and applications. To address these issues, we propose Tree-Planner, which reframes task planning with LLMs into three distinct phases: plan sampling, action tree construction, and grounded deciding. Tree-Planner starts by using an LLM to sample a set of potential plans before execution, followed by the aggregation of them to form an action tree. Finally, the LLM performs a top-down decision-making process on the tree, taking into account real-time environmental information. Experiments show that Tree-Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high efficiency. By decomposing LLM queries into a single plan-sampling call and multiple grounded-deciding calls, a considerable part of the prompt are less likely to be repeatedly consumed. As a result, token consumption is reduced by 92.2% compared to the previously best-performing model. Additionally, by enabling backtracking on the action tree as needed, the correction process becomes more flexible, leading to a 40.5% decrease in error corrections. Project page: https://tree-planner.github.io/

The Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) is a general artificial intelligence benchmark that poses difficulties for pure machine learning methods due to its requirement for fluid intelligence with a focus on reasoning and abstraction. In this work, we introduce an ARC solver, Generalized Planning for Abstract Reasoning (GPAR). It casts an ARC problem as a generalized planning (GP) problem, where a solution is formalized as a planning program with pointers. We express each ARC problem using the standard Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) coupled with external functions representing object-centric abstractions. We show how to scale up GP solvers via domain knowledge specific to ARC in the form of restrictions over the actions model, predicates, arguments and valid structure of planning programs. Our experiments demonstrate that GPAR outperforms the state-of-the-art solvers on the object-centric tasks of the ARC, showing the effectiveness of GP and the expressiveness of PDDL to model ARC problems. The challenges provided by the ARC benchmark motivate research to advance existing GP solvers and understand new relations with other planning computational models. Code is available at github.com/you68681/GPAR.