SAGE: Symbolic Action-Gating and Editing for LLM Task Planners
Large language models (LLMs) are now the default cognitive core of embodied household agents, yet the plans they emit are rarely checked against a grounded model of the environment before execution, and the task-success they report is often measured on benchmarks so saturated that no method can be separated from another. We present SAGE (Symbolic Action-Gating and Editing), a single-LLM planner built from two lightweight mechanisms: a domain-agnostic symbolic gate (~250 lines of Python, zero tokens, $O(|π|)$) that blocks precondition-violating actions with typed reasons as a runtime safety monitor, and a local edit that regenerates only the failed sub-goal's suffix, keeping completed and untouched work intact; a hybrid seed+live memory store supports cold-start coverage. We evaluate under a leak-free protocol (leave-one-out retrieval) over five open-weight models and a 75-task AI2-THOR benchmark. On the standard benchmark goal-completeness saturates (52% of instances trivially solved) and SAGE ties strong hierarchical baselines. On a harder, method-agnostic multi-goal composition, SAGE's completeness lead re-emerges large (+0.06 to +0.23 across four models). Under injected mid-execution failures, SAGE recovers as reliably as whole-plan replanners at 2.4-3.3x fewer LLM calls. As a verify-before-execute gate, the symbolic monitor blocks unsafe actions before actuation and raises simulator-reported step-success for every planner tested (up to +0.11), a signal the verifier never sees (non-circular). Because the gate calls no model (0.008 ms/plan), it is a safety layer that runs essentially free on the edge: SAGE planning reproduces its quality on a Jetson AGX Orin, where small-model verification helps most. We release the benchmark, the leak-free protocol, the recovery and safety-gate harnesses, and a verifier-portability study (auto-induced on ALFWorld, 0.89 held-out).