# A Study on Training and Developing Large Language Models for Behavior Tree Generation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.08089 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08089/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 136 of its 184 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 136)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07258/) (2021)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16789/) (2023)
- [Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11511/) (2023)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [A Survey of Context Engineering for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.13334/) (2025)
- [Behavior Trees Enable Structured Programming of Language Model Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.07439/) (2024)
- [Learning Structured Robot Policies from Vision-Language Models via Synthetic Neuro-Symbolic Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02812/) (2026)
- [Contract-Grounded Behavior Tree Synthesis via Coding Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12220/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents an innovative exploration of the application potential of large language models (LLM) in addressing the challenging task of automatically generating behavior trees (BTs) for complex tasks. The conventional manual BT generation method is inefficient and heavily reliant on domain expertise. On the other hand, existing automatic BT generation technologies encounter bottlenecks related to task complexity, model adaptability, and reliability. In order to overcome these challenges, we propose a novel methodology that leverages the robust representation and reasoning abilities of LLMs. The core contribution of this paper lies in the design of a BT generation framework based on LLM, which encompasses the entire process, from data synthesis and model training to application developing and data verification. Synthetic data is introduced to train the BT generation model (BTGen model), enhancing its understanding and adaptability to various complex tasks, thereby significantly improving its overall performance. In order to ensure the effectiveness and executability of the generated BTs, we emphasize the importance of data verification and introduce a multilevel verification strategy. Additionally, we explore a range of agent design and development schemes with LLM as the central element. We hope that the work in this paper may provide a reference for the researchers who are interested in BT generation based on LLMs.