Write Once, Plan Many: Building Reusable Visual Planning Systems from One Scene

Abstract

Vision-language models (VLMs) can reason about visual planning tasks, but querying them for every instance incurs repeated inference cost and latency. Generating reusable planning programs offers an alternative, but constructing reliable planning systems for new problem domains without extensive supervision remains challenging. We present a training-free framework that constructs reusable perception and planning programs from a domain specification and a single practice scene without a paired solution. The central challenge is obtaining useful feedback from the limited input. Our framework addresses it by leveraging VLM's ability to provide a renderer and a dynamic model based on its scene understanding. Rendering detected states enables comparison with the practice scene, while checking simulated action outcomes against the domain specification helps expose errors in rule implementation. Together, these checks guide refinement of the grounding program and planner without requiring solution labels. After refinement and component selection, the programs are frozen and solve new instances without further VLM calls. The same framework constructs systems across domains without manual pipeline redesign. Across fifteen domain variants spanning 2D and 3D scenes with discrete and continuous state, our systems achieve 99.3% average planning success, compared with 80.9% for the strongest domain-level program-generation baseline and 90.7% for the strongest instance-level baseline. Cost analyses show a favorable success-cost trade-off, and ablations confirm the contributions of the executable domain model, execution feedback, and component selection.