InstructFlow: Adaptive Symbolic Constraint-Guided Code Generation for Long-Horizon Planning

Abstract

Long-horizon planning in robotic manipulation tasks requires translating underspecified, symbolic goals into executable control programs satisfying spatial, temporal, and physical constraints. However, language model-based planners often struggle with long-horizon task decomposition, robust constraint satisfaction, and adaptive failure recovery. We introduce InstructFlow, a multi-agent framework that establishes a symbolic, feedback-driven flow of information for code generation in robotic manipulation tasks. InstructFlow employs a InstructFlow Planner to construct and traverse a hierarchical instruction graph that decomposes goals into semantically meaningful subtasks, while a Code Generator generates executable code snippets conditioned on this graph. Crucially, when execution failures occur, a Constraint Generator analyzes feedback and induces symbolic constraints, which are propagated back into the instruction graph to guide targeted code refinement without regenerating from scratch. This dynamic, graph-guided flow enables structured, interpretable, and failure-resilient planning, significantly improving task success rates and robustness across diverse manipulation benchmarks, especially in constraint-sensitive and long-horizon scenarios.

Cite

Text

Chi et al. "InstructFlow: Adaptive Symbolic Constraint-Guided Code Generation for Long-Horizon Planning." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.

Markdown

[Chi et al. "InstructFlow: Adaptive Symbolic Constraint-Guided Code Generation for Long-Horizon Planning." Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 2025.](https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/chi2025neurips-instructflow/)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{chi2025neurips-instructflow,
  title     = {{InstructFlow: Adaptive Symbolic Constraint-Guided Code Generation for Long-Horizon Planning}},
  author    = {Chi, Haotian and Feng, Zeyu and Lyu, Yueming and Zheng, Chengqi and Luo, Linbo and Ong, Yew-Soon and Tsang, Ivor and Chen, Hechang and Chang, Yi and Yin, Haiyan},
  booktitle = {Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  year      = {2025},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/neurips/2025/chi2025neurips-instructflow/}
}