Language Model as Planner and Formalizer under Constraints

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Authors: Cassie Huang, Stuti Mohan, Ziyi Yang, Stefanie Tellex, Li Kun Zhang
Cited by: 0

Abstract

LLMs have been widely used in planning, either as planners to generate action sequences end-to-end, or as formalizers to represent the planning domain and problem in a formal language that can derive plans deterministically.However, both lines of work rely on standard benchmarks that include only generic and simplistic environmental specifications, leading to potential overestimation of the planning ability of LLMs and safety concerns in downstream tasks.We bridge this gap by augmenting widely used planning benchmarks with manually annotated, fine-grained, and rich natural language constraints spanning four formally defined categories.Over 4 state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs, 4 formal languages, and 4 datasets, we show that the introduction of one-sentence constraints consistently halves performance, indicating current LLMs' lack of robustness and an avenue for future research.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Natural Language Processing Techniques

Publication details

Journal / source
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
13724–13756
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN