# Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.14992 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14992/

## Key facts

- Cited by 861 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in World models for language agents, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 46 of its 94 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 May 2023.

## Placed in

- World models / [World models for language agents](https://mlsanity.com/wm/world-models-for-language-agents/)
- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10122/) (2018)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08265/) (2019)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02193/) (2020)
- [Show Your Work: Scratchpads for Intermediate Computation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00114/) (2021)
- [Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01999/) (2018)
- [Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01815/) (2017)
- [ProgPrompt: Generating Situated Robot Task Plans using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11302/) (2022)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [LLM+P: Empowering Large Language Models with Optimal Planning Proficiency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11477/) (2023)
- [VirtualHome: Simulating Household Activities via Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07011/) (2018)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14176/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 861)

- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [ExpeL: LLM Agents Are Experiential Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.10144/) (2023)
- [Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06769/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Large Language Models for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00515/) (2024)
- [A Comprehensive Overview of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06435/) (2023)
- [Language Agent Tree Search Unifies Reasoning Acting and Planning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04406/) (2023)
- [LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03387/) (2025)
- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [Improve Mathematical Reasoning in Language Models by Automated Process Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06592/) (2024)
- [Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02427/) (2023)
- [Understanding the planning of LLM agents: A survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02716/) (2024)
- [RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20073/) (2025)
- [Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and the Risks of Promoting Obfuscation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11926/) (2025)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [ReST-MCTS*: LLM Self-Training via Process Reward Guided Tree Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03816/) (2024)
- [From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17419/) (2025)
- [rStar-Math: Small LLMs Can Master Math Reasoning with Self-Evolved Deep Thinking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04519/) (2025)
- [Alphazero-like Tree-Search can Guide Large Language Model Decoding and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17179/) (2023)
- [A Survey on Knowledge Distillation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13116/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [To CoT or not to CoT? Chain-of-thought helps mainly on math and symbolic reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12183/) (2024)
- [WebRL: Training LLM Web Agents via Self-Evolving Online Curriculum Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02337/) (2024)
- [Token-Budget-Aware LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18547/) (2024)
- [Monte Carlo Tree Search Boosts Reasoning via Iterative Preference Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.00451/) (2024)
- [When Can LLMs Actually Correct Their Own Mistakes? A Critical Survey of Self-Correction of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01297/) (2024)
- [Automatically Correcting Large Language Models: Surveying the landscape of diverse self-correction strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03188/) (2023)
- [PromptAgent: Strategic Planning with Language Models Enables Expert-level Prompt Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16427/) (2023)
- [Thinking with Images for Multimodal Reasoning: Foundations, Methods, and Future Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23918/) (2025)
- [Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04398/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, especially when prompted to generate intermediate reasoning steps (e.g., Chain-of-Thought, CoT). However, LLMs can still struggle with problems that are easy for humans, such as generating action plans for executing tasks in a given environment, or performing complex math, logical, and commonsense reasoning. The deficiency stems from the key fact that LLMs lack an internal textitworld model to predict the world textitstate (e.g., environment status, intermediate variable values) and simulate long-term outcomes of actions. This prevents LLMs from performing deliberate planning akin to human brains, which involves exploring alternative reasoning paths, anticipating future states and rewards, and iteratively refining existing reasoning steps. To overcome the limitations, we propose a new LLM reasoning framework, underlineReasoning viunderlinea underlinePlanning (RAP). RAP repurposes the LLM as both a world model and a reasoning agent, and incorporates a principled planning algorithm (based on Monto Carlo Tree Search) for strategic exploration in the vast reasoning space. During reasoning, the LLM (as agent) incrementally builds a reasoning tree under the guidance of the LLM (as world model) and task-specific rewards, and obtains a high-reward reasoning path efficiently with a proper balance between exploration textitvs. exploitation. We apply RAP to a variety of challenging reasoning problems including plan generation, math reasoning, and logical inference. Empirical results on these tasks demonstrate the superiority of RAP over various strong baselines, including CoT and least-to-most prompting with self-consistency. RAP on LLAMA-33B surpasses CoT on GPT-4 with 33% relative improvement in a plan generation setting.