SCOPE: Evolving Symbolic World for Planning in Open-Ended Environments
Yundaichuan Zhan, Minghe Gao, Zhongqi Yue, Wendong Bu, Wenqiao Zhang, Guoming Wang, Jisheng Dang, Juncheng Li
Abstract
Recent works have explored integrating Vision-Language Models (VLMs) with classical planners that rely on symbolic representations of planning problem to generate long-horizon plans for complex embodied tasks. However, in open-ended environments, these symbolic representations obtained from perception are often incomplete, leading to suboptimal performance. To address this, we introduce SCOPE, a self-adaptive symbolic planning framework that supports refining action plans and evolving the symbolic world—the symbolic representations of open-ended environments. SCOPE comprises two synergistic modules: a Symbolic Execution Simulator (SESim) that conducts symbolic validation and real execution of action plans, leveraging the feedback to refine the plans and evolve the symbolic world; and a Self-Adaptive Symbolic Memory (SASMem) that further distills feedback into evolving symbolic knowledge to enhance long-horizon planning and modeling of the symbolic world. Experiments in open-ended environments show that SCOPE significantly improves the completeness of the symbolic world, the success rate of plans under environment perturbations, and cross-task grounding and adaptability across diverse embodied scenarios.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
zhan2026scope,
title={{SCOPE}: Evolving Symbolic World for Planning in Open-Ended Environments},
author={Yundaichuan Zhan and Minghe Gao and Zhongqi Yue and Wendong Bu and Wenqiao Zhang and Guoming Wang and Jisheng Dang and Juncheng Li and Siliang Tang and Yueting Zhuang},
booktitle={Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning},
year={2026},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=PLJ53zWDTD}
}