@inproceedings{wang-etal-2026-gala,
    title = "{G}a{L}a: Hypergraph-Guided Visual Language Models for Procedural Planning",
    author = "Wang, Kun  and
      Yiming, Li  and
      Qu, Mingcheng  and
      Zhang, Aqiang  and
      Yang, Guang  and
      Su, Tonghua",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.980/",
    pages = "19590--19603",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Implicit spatial relations and deep semantic structures encoded in object attributes are crucial for procedural planning in embodied AI systems. However, existing approaches often over-rely on the reasoning capabilities of vision language models (VLMs) themselves, while overlooking the rich structured semantic information that can be mined from multimodal inputs. As a result, models struggle to effectively understand functional spatial relationships in complex scenes. To fully exploit implicit spatial relations and deep semantic structures in multimodal data, we propose GaLa, a vision{--}language framework for multimodal procedural planning. GaLa introduces a hypergraph-based representation, where object instances in the image are modeled as nodes, and region-level hyperedges are constructed by aggregating objects according to their attributes and functional semantics. This design explicitly captures implicit semantic relations among objects as well as the hierarchical organization of functional regions. Furthermore, we design a Tri-View HyperGraph Encoder that enforces semantic consistency across the node view, area view, and node{--}area association view via contrastive learning, enabling hypergraph semantics to be more effectively injected into downstream VLM reasoning. Extensive experiments on the ActPlan-1K and ALFRED benchmarks demonstrate that GaLa significantly outperforms existing methods in terms of execution success rate, LCS, and planning correctness."
}