SmallPlan: Leverage Small Language Models for Sequential Path Planning with Simulation-Powered, LLM-Guided Distillation
Abstract
Efficient path planning in robotics, particularly within large-scale, complex environments, remains a significant hurdle. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities, their high computational cost and limited adaptability hinder real-time deployment on edge devices. We present SmallPlan - a novel framework leveraging LLMs as teacher models to train lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) for high-level path planning tasks. In SmallPlan, the SLMs provide optimal action sequences to navigate across scene graphs that compactly represent full-scaled 3D scenes. The SLMs are trained in a simulation-powered, interleaved manner with LLM-guided supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL). This strategy not only enables SLMs to successfully complete navigation tasks but also makes them aware of important factors like distance travel, providing more efficient path planning. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the fine-tuned SLMs perform competitively with larger models like GPT-4o on sequential path planning, without suffering from hallucination and overfitting. SmallPlan is resource-efficient, making it well-suited for edge-device deployment and advancing practical autonomous robotics. Our source code is available here: https://github.com/quangpham2006/SmallPlan
Cite
@article{arxiv.2505.00831,
title = {SmallPlan: Leverage Small Language Models for Sequential Path Planning with Simulation-Powered, LLM-Guided Distillation},
author = {Quang P. M. Pham and Khoi T. N. Nguyen and Nhi H. Doan and Cuong A. Pham and Qinbo Sun and Weimin Qi and Kentaro Inui and Dezhen Song},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.00831},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Paper is under review