Work

On the Limit of Language Models as Planning Formalizers

Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Large Language Models have been found to create plans that are neither executable nor verifiable in grounded environments.An emerging line of work demonstrates success in using the LLM as a formalizer to generate a formal representation of the planning domain in some language, such as Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL).This formal representation can be deterministically solved to find a plan.We systematically evaluate this methodology while bridging some major gaps.While previous work only generates a partial PDDL representation, given templated, and therefore unrealistic environment descriptions, we generate the complete representation given descriptions of various naturalness levels.Among an array of observations critical to improve LLMs' formal planning abilities, we note that most large enough models can effectively formalize descriptions as PDDL, outperforming those directly generating plans, while being robust to lexical perturbation.As the descriptions become more natural-sounding, we observe a decrease in performance and provide detailed error analysis.1
Institution: Drexel University
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4412886640
FWCI: 4.034
Cites: 1
Cited by: 4
Related to: 10