mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Translating Natural Language to Planning Goals with Large-Language Models

arXiv 2302.05128 ↗First posted 10 Feb 2023cs.CL cs.AI cs.ROcited by 132

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Cited by 22 in LLM agents and tool use, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 132 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 20 of its 39 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 10 Feb 2023.

Builds on

20 of 39 references.

References · 20

  1. 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,204
  2. 2020Language Models are Few-Shot Learnerscited by 32,199
  3. 2019Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformercited by 14,491
  4. 2021Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Codecited by 8,053
  5. 2022PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathwayscited by 5,304
  6. 2022Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordancescited by 2,302
  7. 2022LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applicationscited by 1,218
  8. 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,057
  9. 2022Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agentscited by 1,029
  10. 2019ALFRED: A Benchmark for Interpreting Grounded Instructions for Everyday Taskscited by 773
  11. 2022Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Surveycited by 593
  12. 2022PlanBench: An Extensible Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Planning and Reasoning about Changecited by 372
8 more
  1. 2022Pre-Trained Language Models for Interactive Decision-Makingcited by 220
  2. 2022Open-vocabulary Queryable Scene Representations for Real World Planningcited by 159
  3. 2022Structured, flexible, and robust: benchmarking and improving large language models towards more human-like behavior in out-of-distribution reasoning taskscited by 56
  4. 2022Plansformer: Generating Symbolic Plans using Transformerscited by 41
  5. 2022CAPE: Corrective Actions from Precondition Errors using Large Language Modelscited by 30
  6. 2021GPT3-to-plan: Extracting plans from text using GPT-3cited by 26
  7. 2018Extracting Action Sequences from Texts Based on Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 12
  8. 2022MIRROR: Differentiable Deep Social Projection for Assistive Human-Robot Communicationcited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 46; 2024: 50; 2025: 30; 2026: 6.

132 papers.

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  1. 2023VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Modelscited by 733
  2. 2023Eureka: Human-Level Reward Design via Coding Large Language Modelscited by 542
  3. 2023LLM+P: Empowering Large Language Models with Optimal Planning Proficiencycited by 496
  4. 2023On the Planning Abilities of Large Language Models : A Critical Investigationcited by 308
  5. 2023Robots That Ask For Help: Uncertainty Alignment for Large Language Model Plannerscited by 298
  6. 2023SayPlan: Grounding Large Language Models using 3D Scene Graphs for Scalable Robot Task Planningcited by 289
  7. 2023ToolkenGPT: Augmenting Frozen Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Embeddingscited by 238
  8. 2023Large Language Models as Commonsense Knowledge for Large-Scale Task Planningcited by 231
  9. 2023On the Robustness of ChatGPT: An Adversarial and Out-of-distribution Perspectivecited by 208
  10. 2023Leveraging Pre-trained Large Language Models to Construct and Utilize World Models for Model-based Task Planningcited by 204
  11. 2023Large Language Models as General Pattern Machinescited by 196
  12. 2024LLMs Can't Plan, But Can Help Planning in LLM-Modulo Frameworkscited by 178
38 more
  1. 2024Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AIcited by 175
  2. 2024Scene-LLM: Extending Language Model for 3D Visual Understanding and Reasoningcited by 170
  3. 2023Look Before You Leap: Unveiling the Power of GPT-4V in Robotic Vision-Language Planningcited by 161
  4. 2023Generalized Planning in PDDL Domains with Pretrained Large Language Modelscited by 139
  5. 2023Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Collaboration via Large Language Modelscited by 129
  6. 2023From Word Models to World Models: Translating from Natural Language to the Probabilistic Language of Thoughtcited by 118
  7. 2023AutoTAMP: Autoregressive Task and Motion Planning with LLMs as Translators and Checkerscited by 111
  8. 2023Navigation with Large Language Models: Semantic Guesswork as a Heuristic for Planningcited by 88
  9. 2024Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learnerscited by 84
  10. 2024DrEureka: Language Model Guided Sim-To-Real Transfercited by 78
  11. 2023GPT-4V(ision) for Robotics: Multimodal Task Planning from Human Demonstrationcited by 76
  12. 2023Everything of Thoughts: Defying the Law of Penrose Triangle for Thought Generationcited by 73
  13. 2023Plug in the Safety Chip: Enforcing Constraints for LLM-driven Robot Agentscited by 67
  14. 2023Grounded Decoding: Guiding Text Generation with Grounded Models for Embodied Agentscited by 66
  15. 2023Language Models, Agent Models, and World Models: The LAW for Machine Reasoning and Planningcited by 59
  16. 2023See and Think: Embodied Agent in Virtual Environmentcited by 54
  17. 2023SayCanPay: Heuristic Planning with Large Language Models using Learnable Domain Knowledgecited by 49
  18. 2023Can Large Language Models be Good Path Planners? A Benchmark and Investigation on Spatial-temporal Reasoningcited by 49
  19. 2024Guiding Long-Horizon Task and Motion Planning with Vision Language Modelscited by 46
  20. 2025Syntactic and Semantic Control of Large Language Models via Sequential Monte Carlocited by 45
  21. 2023Creative Robot Tool Use with Large Language Modelscited by 42
  22. 2023CoPAL: Corrective Planning of Robot Actions with Large Language Modelscited by 39
  23. 2024Graph-enhanced Large Language Models in Asynchronous Plan Reasoningcited by 37
  24. 2023Learning adaptive planning representations with natural language guidancecited by 36
  25. 2024System-1.x: Learning to Balance Fast and Slow Planning with Language Modelscited by 35
  26. 2024Planning Anything with Rigor: General-Purpose Zero-Shot Planning with LLM-based Formalized Programmingcited by 35
  27. 2023Understanding the Capabilities of Large Language Models for Automated Planningcited by 34
  28. 2024DELTA: Decomposed Efficient Long-Term Robot Task Planning using Large Language Modelscited by 33
  29. 2024Planetarium: A Rigorous Benchmark for Translating Text to Structured Planning Languagescited by 32
  30. 2024VLMPC: Vision-Language Model Predictive Control for Robotic Manipulationcited by 32
  31. 2024How Far Are We From AGI: Are LLMs All We Need?cited by 31
  32. 2024LaMMA-P: Generalizable Multi-Agent Long-Horizon Task Allocation and Planning with LM-Driven PDDL Plannercited by 31
  33. 2023Large Language Models as Zero-Shot Human Models for Human-Robot Interactioncited by 30
  34. 2023An In-depth Survey of Large Language Model-based Artificial Intelligence Agentscited by 30
  35. 2024Exploring Autonomous Agents through the Lens of Large Language Models: A Reviewcited by 30
  36. 2023Vision-Language Interpreter for Robot Task Planningcited by 29
  37. 2024A Large Language Model-Driven Reward Design Framework via Dynamic Feedback for Reinforcement Learningcited by 29
  38. 2023Integrating Action Knowledge and LLMs for Task Planning and Situation Handling in Open Worldscited by 26

50 most cited of 132 All 132 (JSON)

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  1. 2025Can LLM-Reasoning Models Replace Classical Planning? A Benchmark Study
  2. 2025A Systematic Study of Large Language Models for Task and Motion Planning With PDDLStream
  3. 2025LLMs Can Plan Only If We Tell Them
  4. 2023On the Planning Abilities of Large Language Models (A Critical Investigation with a Proposed Benchmark)
  5. 2025Large Language Models for Planning: A Comprehensive and Systematic Survey
  6. 2023Can LLMs Fix Issues with Reasoning Models? Towards More Likely Models for AI Planning
  7. 2024Exploring and Benchmarking the Planning Capabilities of Large Language Models
  8. 2026Language Models as Higher-Order Planning Formalizers