Planning in the Dark: LLM-Symbolic Planning Pipeline Without Experts

Authors

  • Sukai Huang The University of Melbourne
  • Nir Lipovetzky The University of Melbourne
  • Trevor Cohn Google The University of Melbourne

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i25.34855

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in solving natural language-described planning tasks, but their direct use often leads to inconsistent reasoning and hallucination. While hybrid LLM-symbolic planning pipelines have emerged as a more robust alternative, they typically require extensive expert intervention to refine and validate generated action schemas. It not only limits scalability but also introduces a potential for biased interpretation, as a single expert's interpretation of ambiguous natural language descriptions might not align with the user's actual intent. To address this, we propose a novel approach that constructs an action schema library to generate multiple candidates, accounting for the diverse possible interpretations of natural language descriptions. We further introduce a semantic validation and ranking module that automatically filter and rank these candidates without expert-in-the-loop. The experiments showed our pipeline maintains superiority in planning over the direct LLM planning approach. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of a fully automated end-to-end LLM-symbolic planner that requires no expert intervention, opening up the possibility for a broader audience to engage with AI planning with less prerequisite of domain expertise.

Published

2025-04-11

How to Cite

Huang, S., Lipovetzky, N., & Cohn, T. (2025). Planning in the Dark: LLM-Symbolic Planning Pipeline Without Experts. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 39(25), 26542–26550. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v39i25.34855

Issue

Section

AAAI Technical Track on Planning, Routing, and Scheduling