Translating Natural Language to Planning Goals with Large-Language Models

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether large language models can effectively translate natural language goals into structured planning languages, finding they excel at translation but struggle with numerical and spatial reasoning, highlighting their potential and limitations.

Contribution

The study demonstrates that LLMs can serve as effective natural language interfaces for goal translation in planning, with insights into their strengths and weaknesses.

Findings

LLMs are better at translation than planning.

They leverage commonsense to fill in missing goal details.

They struggle with numerical and spatial reasoning tasks.

Abstract

Recent large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, leading to intense excitement about their applicability across various domains. Unfortunately, recent work has also shown that LLMs are unable to perform accurate reasoning nor solve planning problems, which may limit their usefulness for robotics-related tasks. In this work, our central question is whether LLMs are able to translate goals specified in natural language to a structured planning language. If so, LLM can act as a natural interface between the planner and human users; the translated goal can be handed to domain-independent AI planners that are very effective at planning. Our empirical results on GPT 3.5 variants show that LLMs are much better suited towards translation rather than planning. We find that LLMs are able to leverage commonsense knowledge and reasoning to furnish missing details from under-specified goals (as is often the case in natural language). However, our experiments also reveal that LLMs can fail to generate goals in tasks that involve numerical or physical (e.g., spatial) reasoning, and that LLMs are sensitive to the prompts used. As such, these models are promising for translation to structured planning languages, but care should be taken in their use.