# Grounded Decoding: Guiding Text Generation with Grounded Models for Embodied Agents

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.00855 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00855/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Multimodal and embodied agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use.
- Builds on 73 of its 97 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Mar 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM agents and tool use / [Multimodal and embodied agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/multimodal-and-embodied-agents/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 73)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.3215/) (2014)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [Hierarchical Neural Story Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.04833/) (2018)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Open-vocabulary Object Detection via Vision and Language Knowledge Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13921/) (2021)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [Plug and Play Language Models: A Simple Approach to Controlled Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02164/) (2019)
- [PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.06794/) (2022)
- [CTRL: A Conditional Transformer Language Model for Controllable Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05858/) (2019)
- [VideoBERT: A Joint Model for Video and Language Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01766/) (2019)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11302/) (2022)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02005/) (2022)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [EmbodiedBench: Comprehensive Benchmarking Multi-modal Large Language Models for Vision-Driven Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09560/) (2025)
- [DreamVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Model Dreamed with Comprehensive World Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04447/) (2025)
- [Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02561/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07226/) (2023)
- [OneTwoVLA: A Unified Vision-Language-Action Model with Adaptive Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11917/) (2025)
- [Unleashing the potential of prompt engineering for large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14735/) (2023)
- [Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17355/) (2024)
- [SayCanPay: Heuristic Planning with Large Language Models using Learnable Domain Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12682/) (2023)
- [SoFar: Language-Grounded Orientation Bridges Spatial Reasoning and Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13143/) (2025)
- [Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via Sequential Monte Carlo](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13139/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.19683/) (2025)
- [VLMPC: Vision-Language Model Predictive Control for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09829/) (2024)
- [LLaMAR: Long-Horizon Planning for Multi-Agent Robots in Partially Observable Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10031/) (2024)
- [Interactive Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13246/) (2023)
- [ROS-LLM: A ROS framework for embodied AI with task feedback and structured reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.19741/) (2024)
- [FuRL: Visual-Language Models as Fuzzy Rewards for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00645/) (2024)
- [Graphs Meet AI Agents: Taxonomy, Progress, and Future Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18019/) (2025)
- [Fast Controlled Generation from Language Models with Adaptive Weighted Rejection Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05410/) (2025)
- [AlphaBlock: Embodied Finetuning for Vision-Language Reasoning in Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18898/) (2023)
- [Trust the PRoC3S: Solving Long-Horizon Robotics Problems with LLMs and Constraint Satisfaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05572/) (2024)
- [Easier Said Than Done: Unpacking Intent-Behavior Gap in Jailbreaking LLM-Based Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16633/) (2024)
- [NeSyC: A Neuro-symbolic Continual Learner For Complex Embodied Tasks In Open Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00870/) (2025)
- [Point-It-Out: Benchmarking Embodied Reasoning for Vision Language Models in Multi-Stage Visual Grounding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25794/) (2025)
- [Sketch-Guided Constrained Decoding for Boosting Blackbox Large Language Models without Logit Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09967/) (2024)
- [E2CL: Exploration-based Error Correction Learning for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03256/) (2024)
- [Open-World Task and Motion Planning via Vision-Language Model Generated Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08253/) (2024)
- [GraphAgent: Agentic Graph Language Assistant](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.17029/) (2024)
- [REMAC: Self-Reflective and Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Collaboration for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22122/) (2025)
- [VeriGraph: Scene Graphs for Execution Verifiable Robot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10446/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to learn and leverage Internet-scale knowledge through pre-training with autoregressive models. Unfortunately, applying such models to settings with embodied agents, such as robots, is challenging due to their lack of experience with the physical world, inability to parse non-language observations, and ignorance of rewards or safety constraints that robots may require. On the other hand, language-conditioned robotic policies that learn from interaction data can provide the necessary grounding that allows the agent to be correctly situated in the real world, but such policies are limited by the lack of high-level semantic understanding due to the limited breadth of the interaction data available for training them. Thus, if we want to make use of the semantic knowledge in a language model while still situating it in an embodied setting, we must construct an action sequence that is both likely according to the language model and also realizable according to grounded models of the environment. We frame this as a problem similar to probabilistic filtering: decode a sequence that both has high probability under the language model and high probability under a set of grounded model objectives. We demonstrate how such grounded models can be obtained across three simulation and real-world domains, and that the proposed decoding strategy is able to solve complex, long-horizon embodiment tasks in a robotic setting by leveraging the knowledge of both models. The project's website can be found at grounded-decoding.github.io.