PLAN-FM: Bridging Planning and Reasoning in Natural Language with Foundational Models

Schedule (TBD)

Speakers and Panelists (TBD)

David Hsu

National University of Singapore

Human-robot interactions

Chi Wang

Google DeepMind

Agentic AI frameworks

Furong Huang

University of Maryland

Foundational models for sequential decision making

Call for Papers

The 2nd PLAN-FM Bridge Program invites cutting-edge research on leveraging Foundational Models (e.g. large language models, large reasoning models, multi-modal models) for multi-step reasoning and planning. Since 2025, large reasoning models and RL-tuned variants have advanced markedly; hybrid pipelines (LLM + classical planner/verifier) are maturing; and new cross-domain benchmarks expose persistent gaps in executability and robustness. We solicit papers on scalable, grounded, and verifiable planning with foundational models across the topics below.

Topics of interest

• FM for Planning & Decision-Making: Prompting/training for long-horizon control, plan decomposition, and search efficiency.
• Planning for Agent Orchestration: Efficient, accurate, and trustworthy planning solutions in agentic frameworks and applications.
• Embodied & Multi-Agent Planning: Robotics, autonomy, coordination, and human-in-the-loop planning under real-world constraints.
• Reliability, Safety & Guarantees: Verified/executable plans, constraint satisfaction, formal checks, and failure analysis.
• Planner-in-the-Loop Tool Use: Integration with symbolic planners, search (A*, MCTS), simulators, program synthesis, knowledge bases, and environment feedback.
• Benchmarks & Shared Resources: Cross-domain datasets/simulators; standardized tasks for reproducible, apples-to-apples comparisons.
• Plan Quality & Stress-Testing: Metrics and toolkits for executability, optimality, generalization, and efficiency; leaderboards and robustness suites.
• Next-Gen FM Ingredients: Memory/state tracking, long-context handling, world models, multimodal grounding, and modular architectures for planning.

Submission instructions

Papers should be formatted according to the AAAI-26 two-column format (author kit). Submissions are handled on OpenReview. We welcome several submission types:

• Papers – Short (up to 4) and long (up to 8 pages, excluding references) papers, describing novel ideas, perspectives, or early research results.
• Extended Abstracts – up to 2 pages (excluding references), summarizing late-breaking results, preliminary findings, or challenges to provoke discussion.
• System Demonstrations – up to 4 pages (plus references), showcasing innovative systems or prototypes (include a description and optionally a screenshot or link).

Important Dates

• Submission deadlineOctober 31, 2025 (AoE)
• Notifications of acceptanceNovember 14, 2025
• PLAN-FM @ AAAI-26January 20, 2026