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arXiv · 2508.02068

"Set It Up": Functional Object Arrangement with Compositional Generative Models (Journal Version)

Yiqing Xu·Jiayuan Mao·Linfeng Li·Yilun Du·Tomas Lozáno-Pérez·Leslie Pack Kaelbling·David Hsu
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Abstract

Functional object arrangement (FORM) is the task of arranging objects to fulfill a function, e.g., "set up a dining table for two". One key challenge here is that the instructions for FORM are often under-specified and do not explicitly specify the desired object goal poses. This paper presents SetItUp, a neuro-symbolic framework that learns to specify the goal poses of objects from a few training examples and a structured natural-language task specification. SetItUp uses a grounding graph, which is composed of abstract spatial relations among objects (e.g., left-of), as its intermediate representation. This decomposes the FORM problem into two stages: (i) predicting this graph among objects and (ii) predicting object poses given the grounding graph. For (i), SetItUp leverages large language models (LLMs) to induce Python programs from a task specification and a few training examples. This program can be executed to generate grounding graphs in novel scenarios. For (ii), SetItUp pre-trains a collection of diffusion models to capture primitive spatial relations and online composes these models to predict object poses based on the grounding graph. We evaluated SetItUp on a dataset spanning three distinct task families: arranging tableware on a dining table, organizing items on a bookshelf, and laying out furniture in a bedroom. Experiments show that SetItUp outperforms existing models in generating functional, physically feasible, and aesthetically pleasing object arrangements. This article extends our conference paper published at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024.

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Yiqing Xu, Jiayuan Mao, Linfeng Li, Yilun Du, Tomas Lozáno-Pérez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, David Hsu. 2025-08-04. "Set It Up": Functional Object Arrangement with Compositional Generative Models (Journal Version). https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02068

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