English

Learn from the Past: Language-conditioned Object Rearrangement with Large Language Models

Robotics 2025-03-06 v2

Abstract

Object manipulation for rearrangement into a specific goal state is a significant task for collaborative robots. Accurately determining object placement is a key challenge, as misalignment can increase task complexity and the risk of collisions, affecting the efficiency of the rearrangement process. Most current methods heavily rely on pre-collected datasets to train the model for predicting the goal position. As a result, these methods are restricted to specific instructions, which limits their broader applicability and generalisation. In this paper, we propose a framework of flexible language-conditioned object rearrangement based on the Large Language Model (LLM). Our approach mimics human reasoning by making use of successful past experiences as a reference to infer the best strategies to achieve a current desired goal position. Based on LLM's strong natural language comprehension and inference ability, our method generalises to handle various everyday objects and free-form language instructions in a zero-shot manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our methods can effectively execute the robotic rearrangement tasks, even those involving long sequences of orders.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2501.18516,
  title  = {Learn from the Past: Language-conditioned Object Rearrangement with Large Language Models},
  author = {Guanqun Cao and Ryan Mckenna and Erich Graf and John Oyekan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2501.18516},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:26:01.465Z