# Sensory-Motor Control with Large Language Models via Iterative Policy Refinement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.04867 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04867/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 27 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.02971/) (2015)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01643/) (2020)
- [Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04779/) (2020)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [SqueezeLLM: Dense-and-Sparse Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07629/) (2023)
- [PaLI-X: On Scaling up a Multilingual Vision and Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18565/) (2023)
- [AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15980/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models as General Pattern Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04721/) (2023)
- [SMART-LLM: Smart Multi-Agent Robot Task Planning using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10062/) (2023)
- [Embodied Agent Interface: Benchmarking LLMs for Embodied Decision Making](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07166/) (2024)
- [LLM-as-BT-Planner: Leveraging LLMs for Behavior Tree Generation in Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10444/) (2024)
- [Autonomous Industrial Control using an Agentic Framework with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05904/) (2024)
- [On The Planning Abilities of OpenAI's o1 Models: Feasibility, Optimality, and Generalizability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19924/) (2024)
- [Leveraging LLM Agents and Digital Twins for Fault Handling in Process Plants](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02076/) (2025)
- [A Comprehensive Empirical Study of Vision-Language Pre-trained Model for Supervised Cross-Modal Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.02772/) (2022)
- [Rule-Guided Feedback: Enhancing Reasoning by Enforcing Rule Adherence in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11336/) (2025)
- [Physics-Informed Model and Hybrid Planning for Efficient Dyna-Style Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.02217/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We propose a method that enables large language models (LLMs) to control embodied agents through the generation of control policies that directly map continuous observation vectors to continuous action vectors. At the outset, the LLMs generate a control strategy based on a textual description of the agent, its environment, and the intended goal. This strategy is then iteratively refined through a learning process in which the LLMs are repeatedly prompted to improve the current strategy, using performance feedback and sensory-motor data collected during its evaluation. The method is validated on classic control tasks from the Gymnasium library and the inverted pendulum task from the MuJoCo library. The approach proves effective with relatively compact models such as GPT-oss:120b and Qwen2.5:72b. In most cases, it successfully identifies optimal or near-optimal solutions by integrating symbolic knowledge derived through reasoning with sub-symbolic sensory-motor data gathered as the agent interacts with its environment.