Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS: A Robust Decision-Making Framework for Robotic Manipulation in High Uncertainty Environments

Abstract: Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has emerged as a powerful tool for decision-making in robotics, enabling efficient exploration of large search spaces. However, traditional MCTS methods struggle in environments characterized by high uncertainty and noisy data due to their reliance on final-step reward evaluation. The lack of intermediate feedback during search often results in suboptimal decision-making and computational inefficiencies. This paper introduces Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a novel framework that enhances MCTS by incorporating intermediate reward shaping. The core of our approach is the Rewarding Center, which refines search trajectories by dynamically assigning partial rewards using rule-based validation, heuristic guidance, and neural estimation. By integrating these mechanisms, our method enables real-time optimization of search paths, mitigating the effects of error propagation. We evaluate Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS in robotic manipulation tasks under high uncertainty, demonstrating consistent improvements in decision accuracy. Compared to baseline methods, including Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and Vanilla ReST-MCTS, our framework achieves a 2-4% accuracy improvement while maintaining computational feasibility. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of intermediate feedback in search refinement, particularly in pruning incorrect decision paths early. Furthermore, robustness tests show that our method retains high performance across varying levels of uncertainty.