MCTS-EP: Empowering Embodied Planning with Online Preference Optimization

Abstract: This paper introduces MCTS-EP, an online learning framework that combines LLMs (LLM) with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for training embodied agents. MCTS-EP integrates three key components: MCTS-guided exploration for preference data collection, efficient multi-modal reasoning mechanism, and iterative training pipeline based on preference optimization. We theoretically prove that MCTS-EP achieves better performance bounds than conventional on-policy algorithms when the loss function is strongly convex, and demonstrate that it can be formulated as a search-enhanced variant of GAIL. MCTS-EP achieves state-of-the-art performace across serval benchmarks. In ALFWorld, it achieves 92% and 87% success rates for textual and visual tasks. In WebShop, it reaches an average reward of 0.81. MTCS-EP also reduces average interaction steps from from 18.7/19.5 to 10.2/9.9 steps in visual ALFWorld.Code available at: https://github.com/xuhang-2/Embodied-Agent-Planning