A Brain-inspired Hierarchical Framework for Zero-Shot Robot Task Reasoning and Execution

2026-09-05

Abstract

Robots that follow open-ended language instructions need to connect semantic intent to visual scene understanding, geometric feasibility, object states, and physical interaction conditions. End-to-end Vision-Language-Action policies have improved cross-task generalization, but they typically map visual and language inputs directly to robot actions, leaving limited explicit structure for long-horizon decomposition, physical verification, and recovery. We present \method, a zero-shot hierarchical framework functionally inspired by the division of roles in the human brain, comprising visual perception and state inference, language grounding and action-sequence generation from a shared atomic action library, cost-based plan selection, and real-robot execution and verification. The framework grounds commands in explicit object states, composes reusable atomic actions into task-conditioned sequences, ranks alternative sequences by execution cost, and verifies intermediate physical outcomes from refreshed observations. In the evaluation, \method{} completes 10/10 clean board trials, 10/10 pick-and-place trials, and 4/5 pyramid stacking trials for both the flat and irregular initial-layout conditions; the corresponding mean task progress is $99.03\%$, $100.00\%$, and $96.67\%$ respectively. Across all evaluated conditions, \method{} achieves higher success rates than ReKep, Dream2Flow, and $\pi_{0.5}$ benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of combining explicit object-state reasoning, compositional atomic actions, cost-based plan selection, and closed-loop execution verification.

Problem

• Zero-Shot Robot Task
• Vision-Language-Action
• Hierarchical Framework
• Semantic Intent
• Physical Interaction

Innovation

• hierarchical framework
• zero-shot task reasoning
• cost-based plan selection
• closed-loop execution verification