Query-Efficient Planning with Language Models

Planning in complex environments requires an agent to efficiently query a world model to find a feasible sequence of actions from start to goal. Recent work has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs), with their rich prior knowledge and reasoning capabilities, can potentially help with planning by searching over promising states and adapting to feedback from the world. In this paper, we propose and study two fundamentally competing frameworks that leverage LLMs for query-efficient planning. The first uses LLMs as a heuristic within a search-based planner to select promising nodes to expand and propose promising actions. The second uses LLMs as a generative planner to propose an entire sequence of actions from start to goal, query a world model, and adapt based on feedback. We show that while both approaches improve upon comparable baselines, using an LLM as a generative planner results in significantly fewer interactions. Our key finding is that the LLM as a planner can more rapidly adapt its planning strategies based on immediate feedback than LLM as a heuristic. We present evaluations and ablations on Robotouille and PDDL planning benchmarks and discuss connections to existing theory on query-efficient planning algorithms. Code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/llms-for-planning