# Bridging Learned Visual Perception and Symbolic Belief-Space Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16884 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16884/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [VisualBERT: A Simple and Performant Baseline for Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03557/) (2019)
- [Grounded Language-Image Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03857/) (2021)
- [VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03094/) (2022)
- [SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06135/) (2023)
- [iGibson 2.0: Object-Centric Simulation for Robot Learning of Everyday Household Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03272/) (2021)
- [PDDLStream: Integrating Symbolic Planners and Blackbox Samplers via Optimistic Adaptive Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.08705/) (2018)
- [Manipulate-Anything: Automating Real-World Robots using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.18915/) (2024)
- [VisualPredicator: Learning Abstract World Models with Neuro-Symbolic Predicates for Robot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23156/) (2024)
- [LLM-State: Open World State Representation for Long-horizon Task Planning with Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17406/) (2023)
- [DKPROMPT: Domain Knowledge Prompting Vision-Language Models for Open-World Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17659/) (2024)
- [Compiling Uncertainty Away in Conformant Planning Problems with Bounded Width](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.3468/) (2014)
- [Robot Task Planning and Situation Handling in Open Worlds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01287/) (2022)
- [No-Regret Learning with Unbounded Losses: The Case of Logarithmic Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.11219/) (2022)
- [ViPlan: A Benchmark for Visual Planning with Symbolic Predicates and Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13180/) (2025)
- [Replanning in Domains with Partial Information and Sensing Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1401.6048/) (2014)
- [Combined Task and Motion Planning Via Sketch Decompositions (Extended Version with Supplementary Material)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.16277/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In partially observable settings, agents must act without full knowledge of the world state and rely on uncertain state-estimation pipelines. Obtaining grounded and verifiable symbolic plans under such uncertainty remains a key challenge. Recent work has integrated Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to bridge perception and symbolic reasoning, following two main paradigms. The first, VLM-as-planner, maps images directly to action sequences, and the second, VLM-as-grounder, grounds observations into symbolic predicates used as the initial state by off-the-shelf planners. Both approaches ignore uncertainty in the planning process, compromising robustness. We introduce a third paradigm, VLM-as-probabilistic-grounder, a novel approach that captures the uncertainty of VLM predicate groundings as a probability distribution over symbolic states. This enables planning in belief space and producing robust plans under uncertainty. Experiments in simulated household robot settings show improved robustness and task success over deterministic grounding, underscoring how our approach leverages foundation models for reliable planning under uncertainty.