Enabling robots to follow natural language commands to complete zero-shot long-horizon tasks remains challenging. It requires extracting implicit temporal and logical constraints from natural language commands and executing multiple sub-tasks accordingly. Recent zero-shot object navigation methods use vision-language models (VLMs) to guide frontier-based exploration in unknown environments, but they are limited to single-target tasks. Real-world commands such as "Clean either the chair or the couch, then turn on the tv." require navigating to multiple targets in a temporally constrained order, which no existing zero-shot system can handle. We present ViTL, a framework that addresses this gap at two levels. At the task level, we use a large language model (LLM) to compile natural language commands into Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas, which are then converted into Deterministic Finite Automata~(DFA) that coordinate multi-channel value maps and trigger dynamic replanning when new objects are detected. At the navigation level, we introduce directional score: rather than producing a direction-agnostic value across the entire field of view, we label frontier directions on the observation image and extract per-direction scores from the VLM. Experiments on Habitat-Matterport 3D (HM3D) show that the full framework enables zero-shot long-horizon completion of natural language navigation tasks with temporal constraints, and that directional score improves single-target navigation accuracy and efficiency over the baseline.
Yunhao Yang, Neel P. Bhatt, Kevin Wang +3cs.RO cs.AI
Reusable robot skills are becoming the basic units through which embodied agents turn open-ended instructions into long-horizon physical behavior. We argue that, while foundation models have collapsed the cost of creating these skills, the cost of trusting them has not. Existing skill-evolution loops refine skills through execution feedback, unit tests, environment reward, or LLM self-critique, but these signals provide only trace-level evidence: they show that a skill worked on sampled executions, not that skill-induced plans satisfy temporal safety contracts under untested conditions. We introduce VASO, a framework for verification-guided self-evolution of LLM-generated robot skill contracts. In VASO, each skill is represented as a semantic contract with two coupled interfaces: a formal interface that aligns robot states, observations, and control commands with logical propositions for model checking, and a planner-facing interface that guides executable behavior generation. A model checker first filters logically inconsistent skill contracts, then verifies plans induced by the skill against global and local temporal specifications. When verification fails, VASO translates the counterexample trace into a textual gradient that updates the reusable skill contract while keeping foundation-model weights frozen. On Clearpath Jackal and PX4 quadcopter tasks, VASO reaches 97.2% formal-specification compliance using fewer than 100 optimization samples, outperforming execution-feedback, prompt-optimization, and fine-tuning baselines. To our knowledge, VASO is the first framework that closes the loop between formal verification and self-evolving LLM-generated skills for physical AI agents: formal counterexamples become optimization feedback for reusable robot skill contracts, rather than merely verifying one-off plans, tuning planner prompts, or fine-tuning model weights.