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arXiv · 2507.15130

Enhancing Visual Planning with Auxiliary Tasks and Multi-token Prediction

Ce Zhang·Yale Song·Ruta Desai·Michael Louis Iuzzolino·Joseph Tighe·Gedas Bertasius·Satwik Kottur
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Abstract

Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA) aims to predict a sequence of user actions required to achieve a specified goal based on a video showing the user's progress. Although recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising results in video understanding, long-horizon visual planning remains a challenging problem. We identify two challenges in training large MLLMs for video-based planning tasks: (1) scarcity of procedural annotations, limiting the model's ability to learn procedural task dynamics effectively, and (2) inefficiency of next-token prediction objective to explicitly capture the structured action space for visual planning when compared to free-form, natural language. To tackle data scarcity, we introduce Auxiliary Task Augmentation. We design and train our model on auxiliary tasks relevant to long-horizon video-based planning (e.g., goal prediction) to augment the model's planning ability. To more explicitly model the structured action space unique to visual planning tasks, we leverage Multi-token Prediction, extending traditional next-token prediction by using multiple heads to predict multiple future tokens during training. Our approach, VideoPlan, achieves state-of-the-art VPA performance on the COIN and CrossTask datasets, surpassing prior methods by 7.3% and 3.4%, respectively, when predicting 3 future actions. We further extend our method to the challenging Ego4D Long-term Action Anticipation task, and show that it is on par with the state-of-the-art approaches despite not using specialized egocentric features. Code will be made available.

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Ce Zhang, Yale Song, Ruta Desai, Michael Louis Iuzzolino, Joseph Tighe, Gedas Bertasius, Satwik Kottur. 2025-07-20. Enhancing Visual Planning with Auxiliary Tasks and Multi-token Prediction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15130

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