Behavior trees (BTs) are widely adopted in the field of agent control, particularly in robotics, due to their modularity and reactivity. However, constructing a BT that meets the desired expectations is time-consuming and challenging, especially for non-experts. This paper presents BtBot , a multi-modal sketch-based behavior tree synthesis technique. Given a natural language task description and a set of positive and negative examples, BtBot automatically generates a BT program that aligns with the natural language description and meets the requirements of the examples. Inside BtBot , an LLM is employed to understand the task’s natural language description and generate a sketch of the task execution. Then, BtBot searches the sketch to synthesize a candidate BT program consistent with the user-provided positive and negative examples. When the sketch is proven to be incapable of generating the target BT, BtBot provides a multi-step repairing method that modifies the control nodes and structure of the sketch to search for the desired BT. We have implemented BtBot in a prototype and evaluated it on a benchmark of 70 tasks across multiple scenarios. The experimental results indicate that BtBot outperforms the existing BT synthesis techniques in effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, two user studies have been conducted to demonstrate the usefulness of BtBot .

@article{paperbot3015,
  title = {Multi-modal Sketch-Based Behavior Tree Synthesis},
  author = {Wenmeng Zhang and Zhenbang Chen and Weijiang Hong},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages},
  volume = {9},
  number = {OOPSLA2},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1145/3763178}
}