MMPlanner: Zero-Shot Multimodal Procedural Planning with Chain-of-Thought Object State Reasoning

Afrina Tabassum, Bin Guo, Xiyao Ma, Hoda Eldardiry, Ismini Lourentzou


Abstract
Multimodal Procedural Planning (MPP) aims to generate step-by-step instructions that combine text and images, with the central challenge of preserving object-state consistency across modalities while producing informative plans. Existing approaches often leverage large language models (LLMs) to refine textual steps; however, visual object-state alignment and systematic evaluation are largely underexplored.We present MMPlanner, a zero-shot MPP framework that introduces Object State Reasoning Chain-of-Thought (OSR-CoT) prompting to explicitly model object-state transitions and generate accurate multimodal plans. To assess plan quality, we design LLM-as-a-judge protocols for planning accuracy and cross-modal alignment, and further propose a visual step-reordering task to measure temporal coherence.Experiments on RecipePlan and WikiPlan show that MMPlanner achieves state-of-the-art performance, improving textual planning by +6.8%, cross-modal alignment by +11.9%, and visual step ordering by +26.7%.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1011
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18623–18639
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1011/
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Afrina Tabassum, Bin Guo, Xiyao Ma, Hoda Eldardiry, and Ismini Lourentzou. 2025. MMPlanner: Zero-Shot Multimodal Procedural Planning with Chain-of-Thought Object State Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 18623–18639, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MMPlanner: Zero-Shot Multimodal Procedural Planning with Chain-of-Thought Object State Reasoning (Tabassum et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1011.pdf
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