CausGround: Causal Interaction Grounding for Adaptive Embodied Planning
Abstract
CausGround extracts reusable action preconditions and effects from interaction experience to improve embodied planning and reasoning across diverse environments without model retraining.
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising reasoning capabilities, but reliable physical interaction requires planning that accounts for when actions are executable and how they change the world. These preconditions and effects are environment-dependent and often not captured by MLLMs, making adaptation challenging. Yet existing approaches either require costly environment-specific training or rely on unstructured interaction experience that is difficult to reuse. Therefore, we introduce CausGround, a non-parametric causal interaction grounding framework that distills interaction experience into reusable action-centered causal knowledge. CausGround identifies action preconditions and effects and organizes them in a factorized world-state representation capturing object attributes and inter-object relations. At planning time, task-relevant causal dependencies are grounded in current observations to support backward reasoning over preconditions and forward reasoning over effects for action selection and multi-step planning. We evaluate CausGround on simulated high-level planning, interaction reasoning, and real-world robot manipulation. On adapted VirtualHome and RoboCasa benchmarks, CausGround improves vision-based high-level planning across MLLM backbones, increasing average task success from 24.9% to 53.3% on VirtualHome and closed-loop planning success from 43.0% to 57.0% on RoboCasa. On SWITCH, average interaction reasoning accuracy increases from 25.8% to 31.9%, indicating improved action selection, recovery, and verification. Moreover, real-world experiments show that CausGround reasons backward from MLLM-interpreted goals to derive executable high-level action sequences for sequential manipulation. These results demonstrate that reusable action preconditions and effects support long-horizon embodied planning across diverse environments without parameter updates.
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CausGround: Causal Interaction Grounding for Adaptive Embodied Planning
Embodied planning requires more than knowing what to do. Agents must also understand when an action is executable and how it changes the world.
We introduce CausGround, a non-parametric causal interaction grounding framework that distills interaction experience into reusable action preconditions and effects, enabling adaptive embodied planning without updating model parameters.
What CausGround offers:
Learning causal knowledge from experience: CausGround extracts action preconditions and effects from interaction trajectories, organizing them into reusable generic and instance-specific knowledge.
Factorized world-state representation: Object attributes and inter-object relations are explicitly represented, enabling causal knowledge to be grounded in current visual observations.
Task-grounded causal planning: CausGround reasons backward over action preconditions and forward over action effects, guiding a frozen MLLM planner toward executable multi-step actions.
Improved embodied planning: Across VirtualHome and RoboCasa, CausGround improves average task success from 24.9% to 53.3% and closed-loop planning success from 43.0% to 57.0%, respectively.
Generalization across environments: CausGround improves interaction reasoning on SWITCH (25.8% to 31.9%) and demonstrates real-world sequential robotic manipulation without parameter updates.
Toward continuously adaptable embodied agents: As new interaction experience becomes available, CausGround provides a way to expand reusable causal knowledge without retraining the underlying MLLM.
Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29702
Project Page: https://causground.github.io/
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