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

Schedule

9:00 AM to 5:00 PM (Singapore Time)
Location: Topaz 220 – 225 (map)

Invited Speakers

David Hsu
National University of Singapore

Bio:
David Hsu is a professor of computer science and the Director of Smart Systems Institute at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is an IEEE Fellow. His research lies in the intersection of robotics and AI. In recent years, he has been working on robot planning and learning under uncertainty for human-centered robots. His work won multiple international awards, including, most recently, Test of Time Award at Robotics: Science & Systems (RSS) in 2021 and IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize in 2022. He has chaired or co-chaired several international robotics conferences, including WAFR 2010, RSS 2015, ICRA 2016, and CoRL 2021. He served on the editorial boards of Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and International Journal of Robotics Research. He is currently an Editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

Pulkit Verma
Indian Institute of Technology Madras

Bio:
Pulkit Verma is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Madras. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Interactive Robotics Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked with Prof. Julie Shah. His research focuses on the safe and reliable behavior of taskable AI agents. He investigates the minimal set of requirements in an AI system that would enable a user to assess and understand the limits of its safe operability. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, where he worked with Prof. Siddharth Srivastava. Before that, he completed his M.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati with Prof. Pradip K. Das. He was awarded the ICAPS 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award at ICAPS 2025, AAAI/ACM SIGAI Innovative AI Education Award at AAAI 2025's EAAI Symposium, Graduate College Completion Fellowship at ASU in 2023, Post Graduation Scholarship from the Government of India in 2013 and 2014, and received the Best Demo Award at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) in 2022.

Asim Munawar
IBM Research

Bio:
Dr. Asim Munawar is a Project Lead at IBM’s Watson Research Center in New York, where he heads efforts to enhance reasoning, planning, and agentic workflows in enterprise-scale large language models. With over 15 years of experience in AI—more than a decade of it at IBM Research—he has held key leadership roles, including Manager and Program Director for Neuro-Symbolic AI. Dr. Munawar earned his Ph.D. from Hokkaido University, Japan, and has authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications. He is an inventor on 20+ U.S. patents and a frequent keynote and invited speaker at top venues such as IJCAI, ICSE, and ACMSE. He also serves on advisory boards for the National Center of Artificial Intelligence in Pakistan and the Centaur AI Institute in the U.S.

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 deadlineNov 10, 2025 (AoE)
• Notifications of acceptanceNov 17, 2025 (AoE)
• PLAN-FM @ AAAI-26Jan 21, 2026 (Singapore Time)