VARP: A Visual Adaptive Rearrangement Planner for Non-Monotone Object Rearrangement Planning

Abstract

Object rearrangement planning in cluttered environments is often non-monotone, requiring objects to be temporarily relocated before reaching their final destinations. Although search-based planners can solve such tasks, they incur substantial computational cost and require expensive replanning when the environment changes. We propose the Visual Adaptive Rearrangement Planner (VARP), which learns non-monotone rearrangement directly from visual state representations generated from expert demonstrations. VARP predicts pick-and-place actions from the current and goal visual state representations, and incorporates an Action Refinement Strategy (ARS) to improve action feasibility and a Progress Enforcement Strategy (PES) to mitigate progress stagnation. By continuously updating actions from the latest visual state representations, VARP adapts online to disturbances without replanning from scratch or performing online combinatorial search. In challenging rearrangement benchmarks, VARP achieves a 98.3\% success rate with only 0.4 s planning time per task, 97.5\% success under execution-time disturbances, and 94.5\% under continuous severe disturbances, while generalizing effectively to unseen object counts. These results demonstrate that VARP provides a scalable and robust solution for non-monotone object rearrangement.