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February 8, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Neurosymbolic Explanation Selection in Robotics: Combining the Strengths of Planning and Foundation Models for XAI

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LWLennart WachowiakKing's College LondonACAndrew ColesKing's College LondonOCOya; id_orcid 0000-0002-7213-6359 Celiktutan

Key Points

  • This research aims to develop a neurosymbolic system that integrates task planning with explainable AI to generate explanations for robotic actions.
  • Developed a neurosymbolic pipeline linking a task planner with a logging interface.
  • Utilized a large language model to match natural language questions with relevant plan steps.
  • Conducted offline evaluations with 180 questions over six plans across two domains.
  • Performed a user study to compare LLM-consolidated explanations to raw logs and planner-only explanations.
  • Achieved an F1 score of 0.91 for question matching using the LLM, outperforming other methods.
  • Lower-compute embedding baseline achieved an F1 score of 0.62, while rule-based matching scored 0.02.
  • User preferences indicated a significant favor towards LLM-consolidated explanations.

Abstract

Robots operating in human environments should be able to answer diverse, explanation-seeking questions about their past behavior. We present a neurosymbolic pipeline that links a task planner with a unified logging interface, which attaches heterogeneous XAI artifacts (e.g., visual heatmaps, navigation feedback) to individual plan steps. Given a natural language question, a large language model selects the most relevant actions and consolidates the associated logs into a multimodal explanation. In an offline evaluation on 180 questions across six plans in two domains, we show that an LLM-based question matcher retrieves relevant plan steps accurately (F1 Score of 0.91), outperforming a lower-compute embedding baseline (0.62) and a rule-based syntax/keyword matcher (0.02). A preliminary user study (N=30) suggests that users prefer the LLM-consolidated explanations over raw logs and planner-only explanations.

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Cite This Study

Wachowiak et al. (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/698828410fc35cd7a88478fchttps://doi.org/10.1145/3776734.3794387
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