Contrastive Energy Fields for Inference-Time Procedure Planning in Instructional Videos
Mohamed Afham, Christoph Reich, Oliver Hahn, Daniel Cremers, Stefan Roth
Abstract
Procedure planning seeks to estimate a sequence of actions to transition from an observed initial state to a given goal state. Current procedure planning approaches directly predict action sequences from latent representations using feed-forward neural networks or diffusion-based inference. These paradigms treat every action as plausible, lacking the ability to enforce task-specific logical constraints that render certain actions irrelevant or not plausible. We propose CEFITO, a procedure planning approach that learns a predictor to express an action-conditioned representation space. Based on this representation space, we formulate procedure planning as a task-constrained optimization problem. Unlike prior methods, CEFITO explicitly reasons over the action space by omitting irrelevant actions during inference-time planning. This reformulation enables effective procedure planning and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on two established procedure planning benchmarks.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Wed, 2 Sept 2026.