ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints

Pei-An Chen, Yongching Liang, Jia-Fong Yeh, Hung-Ting Su, Yi-Ting Chen, Min Sun, Winston H. Hsu


Abstract
Intelligent embodied agents should not simply follow instructions, as real-world environments often involve unexpected conditions and exceptions. However, existing methods usually focus on directly executing instructions, without considering whether the target objects can actually be manipulated, meaning they fail to assess available affordances. To address this limitation, we introduce DynAfford, a benchmark that evaluates embodied agents in dynamic environments where object affordances may change over time and are not specified in the instruction. DynAfford requires agents to perceive object states, infer implicit preconditions, and adapt their actions accordingly. To enable this capability, we introduce ADAPT (Affordance-Driven Adaptive Planning and Task execution), a plug-and-play module that augments existing planners with explicit affordance reasoning. Experiments demonstrate that incorporating ADAPT significantly improves robustness and task success across both seen and unseen environments. We also show that a domain-adapted, LoRA-finetuned vision-language model used as the affordance inference backend outperforms a commercial LLM (GPT-4o), highlighting the importance of task-aligned affordance grounding.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1109
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
24188–24206
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1109/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pei-An Chen, Yongching Liang, Jia-Fong Yeh, Hung-Ting Su, Yi-Ting Chen, Min Sun, and Winston H. Hsu. 2026. ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 24188–24206, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ADAPT: Benchmarking Commonsense Planning under Unspecified Affordance Constraints (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1109.pdf
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