mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

LaGEA: Language Guided Embodied Agents for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv 2509.23155 ↗First posted 27 Sep 2025cs.ROcited by 2

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Multimodal and embodied agents

Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation benefits from foundation models that describe goals, but today's agents still lack a principled way to learn from their own mistakes. We ask whether natural language can serve as feedback, an error-reasoning signal that helps embodied agents diagnose what went wrong and correct course. We introduce LaGEA (Language Guided Embodied Agents), a framework that turns episodic, schema-constrained reflections from a vision language model (VLM) into temporally grounded guidance for reinforcement learning. LaGEA summarizes each attempt in concise language, localizes the decisive moments in the trajectory, aligns feedback with visual state in a shared representation, and converts goal progress and feedback agreement into bounded, step-wise shaping rewards whose influence is modulated by an adaptive, failure-aware coefficient. This design yields dense signals early when exploration needs direction and gracefully recedes as competence grows. On the Meta-World MT10 and Robotic Fetch embodied manipulation benchmark, LaGEA improves average success over the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods by 9.0% on random goals, 5.3% on fixed goals, and 17% on fetch tasks, while converging faster. These results support our hypothesis: language, when structured and grounded in time, is an effective mechanism for teaching robots to self-reflect on mistakes and make better choices.

Key facts. Cited by 2 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 68 of its 78 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 27 Sep 2025.

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68 of 78 references.

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  1. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents18 Jan

Other references · 67

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  2. 2026Guava: Distilling Frontier VLMs into a Compact Agent through a Robotic Manipulation Harness
  3. 2026Find Something You Can't Do: Agentic Real-World Reinforcement Learning for Self-Improving VLA Models
  4. 2023ERRA: An Embodied Representation and Reasoning Architecture for Long-horizon Language-conditioned Manipulation Tasks
  5. 2026RoboHarness: A Simple Harness Outperforms VLA and World Actions Models
  6. 2026Act-Observe-Rewrite: Multimodal Coding Agents as In-Context Policy Learners for Robot Manipulation
  7. 2025ManiTaskGen: A Comprehensive Task Generator for Benchmarking and Improving Vision-Language Agents on Embodied Decision-Making
  8. 2026PLanAR: Planning-Language-Grounded Agentic Reasoning for Robot Manipulation