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Breaking Task Impasses Quickly: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Learning for Open-World Robotics

Robotics 2026-01-27 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Adapting to unforeseen novelties in open-world environments remains a major challenge for autonomous systems. While hybrid planning and reinforcement learning (RL) approaches show promise, they often suffer from sample inefficiency, slow adaptation, and catastrophic forgetting. We present a neuro-symbolic framework integrating hierarchical abstractions, task and motion planning (TAMP), and reinforcement learning to enable rapid adaptation in robotics. Our architecture combines symbolic goal-oriented learning and world model-based exploration to facilitate rapid adaptation to environmental changes. Validated in robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, our approach achieves faster convergence, improved sample efficiency, and superior robustness over state-of-the-art hybrid methods, demonstrating its potential for real-world deployment.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.16985,
  title  = {Breaking Task Impasses Quickly: Adaptive Neuro-Symbolic Learning for Open-World Robotics},
  author = {Pierrick Lorang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.16985},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

IEEE ICRA 2025 Doctoral Consortium

R2 v1 2026-07-01T09:17:45.439Z