# GhostShell: Streaming LLM Function Calls for Concurrent Embodied Programming

Source: [GhostShell: Streaming LLM Function Calls for Concurrent Embodied Programming](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7a861e209131cea83b12>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2026-07-22T05:00:13.060Z

Authors: Jian Gong, Youwei Huang, Bo Yuan, Ming Zhu, Zhou Liao, Jianhang Liang, Juncheng Zhan, Jinke Wang, Hang Shu, Zihao Xu, Mingyue Xiong, Yanjun Ye, Yufan Zu, Yang Zhou, Yihan Ding, Xuannian Chen, Xingyu Lu, Runjie Ban, Bingchao Huang

Published: 2025-08-07T11:55:46.000Z

## Abstract

We present GhostShell, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for streaming and concurrent behavioral programming in embodied systems. In contrast to predefined behavioral structures and plan-then-execute paradigms, GhostShell enables reasoning-while-acting by incrementally invoking functions during LLM streaming generation. We define function tokens as an XML-based function-call representation that GhostShell parses from the LLM generation stream and maps to callable functions. A multi-channel scheduling algorithm further orchestrates these calls with intra-channel synchronous and inter-channel asynchronous dispatch, coordinating sequential-parallel behavior execution across multiple robotic components. We evaluate GhostShell on our robotic prototype CoCo across 33 real-world tasks with LLMs from nine providers. On 30 grounded Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) tasks, our approach achieves the highest Directed Structured Behavior Correctness (DSBC) score of 0.83 with Claude-Sonnet-4, while on three long-horizon multimodal tasks, GPT-4.1 attains a top human evaluation score of 7.0/10. Compared to native LLM function calling, our function token schema achieves a 15/15 task completion rate versus 6/15, particularly in coordinating concurrent linguistic and physical actions. Supplementary materials, including videos, are available at https://coco-robot.github.io/GhostShell.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05298>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.05298.pdf>)