Documentation Retrieval Improves Planning Language Generation

Abstract

Certain strong LLMs have shown promise for zero-shot formal planning by generating planning languages like PDDL. Yet, the performance of most open-source models under 50B parameters has been reported to be close to zero due to the low-resource nature of these languages. We significantly improve their performance via a series of lightweight pipelines that integrates documentation retrieval with modular code generation and error refinement. With models like Llama-4-Maverick, our best pipeline improves plan correctness from 0% to over 80% on the common BlocksWorld domain. However, while syntactic errors are substantially reduced, semantic errors persist in more challenging domains, revealing fundamental limitations in current models' reasoning capabilities.

arXiv comment12 pages, 14 figures, 1 table