Daily Papers

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in complex, multi-step workflows involving planning, tool use, reflection, and interaction with external knowledge systems. These workflows generate rapidly expanding contexts that must be curated, transformed, and compressed to maintain fidelity, avoid attention dilution, and reduce inference cost. Prior work on summarization and query-aware compression largely ignores the multi-step, plan-aware nature of agentic reasoning. In this work, we introduce PAACE (Plan-Aware Automated Context Engineering), a unified framework for optimizing the evolving state of LLM agents through next-k-task relevance modeling, plan-structure analysis, instruction co-refinement, and function-preserving compression. PAACE comprises (1) PAACE-Syn, a large-scale generator of synthetic agent workflows annotated with stepwise compression supervision, and (2) PAACE-FT, a family of distilled, plan-aware compressors trained from successful teacher demonstrations. Experiments on long-horizon benchmarks (AppWorld, OfficeBench, and 8-Objective QA) demonstrate that PAACE consistently improves agent correctness while substantially reducing context load. On AppWorld, PAACE achieves higher accuracy than all baselines while lowering peak context and cumulative dependency. On OfficeBench and multi-hop QA, PAACE improves both accuracy and F1, achieving fewer steps, lower peak tokens, and reduced attention dependency. Distilled PAACE-FT retains 97 percent of the teacher's performance while reducing inference cost by over an order of magnitude, enabling practical deployment of plan-aware compression with compact models.

Large language model (LLM)-based agents exhibit strong step-by-step reasoning capabilities over short horizons, yet often fail to sustain coherent behavior over long planning horizons. We argue that this failure reflects a fundamental mismatch: step-wise reasoning induces a form of step-wise greedy policy that is adequate for short horizons but fails in long-horizon planning, where early actions must account for delayed consequences. From this planning-centric perspective, we study LLM-based agents in deterministic, fully structured environments with explicit state transitions and evaluation signals. Our analysis reveals a core failure mode of reasoning-based policies: locally optimal choices induced by step-wise scoring lead to early myopic commitments that are systematically amplified over time and difficult to recover from. We introduce FLARE (Future-aware Lookahead with Reward Estimation) as a minimal instantiation of future-aware planning to enforce explicit lookahead, value propagation, and limited commitment in a single model, allowing downstream outcomes to influence early decisions. Across multiple benchmarks, agent frameworks, and LLM backbones, FLARE consistently improves task performance and planning-level behavior, frequently allowing LLaMA-8B with FLARE to outperform GPT-4o with standard step-by-step reasoning. These results establish a clear distinction between reasoning and planning.

LLM-based autonomous agents lack persistent procedural memory: they re-derive solutions from scratch even when structurally identical tasks have been solved before. We present APEX-EM, a non-parametric online learning framework that accumulates, retrieves, and reuses structured procedural plans without modifying model weights. APEX-EM introduces: (1) a structured experience representation encoding the full procedural-episodic trace of each execution -- planning steps, artifacts, iteration history with error analysis, and quality scores; (2) a Plan-Retrieve-Generate-Iterate-Ingest (PRGII) workflow with Task Verifiers providing multi-dimensional reward signals; and (3) a dual-outcome Experience Memory with hybrid retrieval combining semantic search, structural signature matching, and plan DAG traversal -- enabling cross-domain transfer between tasks sharing no lexical overlap but analogous operational structure. Successful experiences serve as positive in-context examples; failures as negative examples with structured error annotations. We evaluate on BigCodeBench, KGQAGen-10k, and Humanity's Last Exam using Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5. On KGQAGen-10k, APEX-EM achieves 89.6% accuracy versus 41.3% without memory (+48.3pp), surpassing the oracle-retrieval upper bound (84.9%). On BigCodeBench, it reaches 83.3% SR from a 53.9% baseline (+29.4pp), exceeding MemRL's +11.0pp gain under comparable frozen-backbone conditions (noting backbone differences controlled for in our analysis). On HLE, entity graph retrieval reaches 48.0% from 25.2% (+22.8pp). Ablations show component value is task-dependent: rich judge feedback is negligible for code generation but critical for structured queries (+10.3pp), while binary-signal iteration partially compensates for weaker feedback.

While specialized AI models excel at isolated video tasks like generation or understanding, real-world applications demand complex, iterative workflows that combine these capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce UniVA, an open-source, omni-capable multi-agent framework for next-generation video generalists that unifies video understanding, segmentation, editing, and generation into cohesive workflows. UniVA employs a Plan-and-Act dual-agent architecture that drives a highly automated and proactive workflow: a planner agent interprets user intentions and decomposes them into structured video-processing steps, while executor agents execute these through modular, MCP-based tool servers (for analysis, generation, editing, tracking, etc.). Through a hierarchical multi-level memory (global knowledge, task context, and user-specific preferences), UniVA sustains long-horizon reasoning, contextual continuity, and inter-agent communication, enabling interactive and self-reflective video creation with full traceability. This design enables iterative and any-conditioned video workflows (e.g., text/image/video-conditioned generation rightarrow multi-round editing rightarrow object segmentation rightarrow compositional synthesis) that were previously cumbersome to achieve with single-purpose models or monolithic video-language models. We also introduce UniVA-Bench, a benchmark suite of multi-step video tasks spanning understanding, editing, segmentation, and generation, to rigorously evaluate such agentic video systems. Both UniVA and UniVA-Bench are fully open-sourced, aiming to catalyze research on interactive, agentic, and general-purpose video intelligence for the next generation of multimodal AI systems. (https://univa.online/)

Plan-and-Write is a common hierarchical approach in long-form narrative text generation, which first creates a plan to guide the narrative writing. Following this approach, several studies rely on simply prompting large language models for planning, which often yields suboptimal results. In this paper, we propose a new framework called Evaluation-guided Iterative Plan Extraction for long-form narrative text generation (EIPE-text), which extracts plans from the corpus of narratives and utilizes the extracted plans to construct a better planner. EIPE-text has three stages: plan extraction, learning, and inference. In the plan extraction stage, it iteratively extracts and improves plans from the narrative corpus and constructs a plan corpus. We propose a question answer (QA) based evaluation mechanism to automatically evaluate the plans and generate detailed plan refinement instructions to guide the iterative improvement. In the learning stage, we build a better planner by fine-tuning with the plan corpus or in-context learning with examples in the plan corpus. Finally, we leverage a hierarchical approach to generate long-form narratives. We evaluate the effectiveness of EIPE-text in the domains of novels and storytelling. Both GPT-4-based evaluations and human evaluations demonstrate that our method can generate more coherent and relevant long-form narratives. Our code will be released in the future.

In the field of urban planning, existing Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently fail to effectively analyze and evaluate planning maps, despite the critical importance of these visual elements for urban planners and related educational contexts. Planning maps, which visualize land use, infrastructure layouts, and functional zoning, require specialized understanding of spatial configurations, regulatory requirements, and multi-scale analysis. To address this challenge, we introduce PlanGPT-VL, the first domain-specific Vision-Language Model tailored specifically for urban planning maps. PlanGPT-VL employs three innovative approaches: (1) PlanAnno-V framework for high-quality VQA data synthesis, (2) Critical Point Thinking to reduce hallucinations through structured verification, and (3) comprehensive training methodology combining Supervised Fine-Tuning with frozen vision encoder parameters. Through systematic evaluation on our proposed PlanBench-V benchmark, we demonstrate that PlanGPT-VL significantly outperforms general-purpose state-of-the-art VLMs in specialized planning map interpretation tasks, offering urban planning professionals a reliable tool for map analysis, assessment, and educational applications while maintaining high factual accuracy. Our lightweight 7B parameter model achieves comparable performance to models exceeding 72B parameters, demonstrating efficient domain specialization without sacrificing performance.

We introduce ResPlan, a large-scale dataset of 17,000 detailed, structurally rich, and realistic residential floor plans, created to advance spatial AI research. Each plan includes precise annotations of architectural elements (walls, doors, windows, balconies) and functional spaces (such as kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms). ResPlan addresses key limitations of existing datasets such as RPLAN (Wu et al., 2019) and MSD (van Engelenburg et al., 2024) by offering enhanced visual fidelity and greater structural diversity, reflecting realistic and non-idealized residential layouts. Designed as a versatile, general-purpose resource, ResPlan supports a wide range of applications including robotics, reinforcement learning, generative AI, virtual and augmented reality, simulations, and game development. Plans are provided in both geometric and graph-based formats, enabling direct integration into simulation engines and fast 3D conversion. A key contribution is an open-source pipeline for geometry cleaning, alignment, and annotation refinement. Additionally, ResPlan includes structured representations of room connectivity, supporting graph-based spatial reasoning tasks. Finally, we present comparative analyses with existing benchmarks and outline several open benchmark tasks enabled by ResPlan. Ultimately, ResPlan offers a significant advance in scale, realism, and usability, providing a robust foundation for developing and benchmarking next-generation spatial intelligence systems.

Planning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) because such complex tasks require models to coordinate goals, constraints, resources, and long-term consequences into executable and verifiable solutions. Existing planning benchmarks, however, usually treat planning data as fixed collections of instances rather than controllable generation targets. This limits scenario coverage, ties difficulty to surface-level proxies rather than structural sources, and offers limited support for scalable generation, automatic verification, or planning-oriented training. We introduce PlanningBench, a framework for generating scalable, diverse, and verifiable planning data for both evaluation and training. PlanningBench starts from real planning scenarios and abstracts practical workflows into a structured taxonomy of more than 30 task types, subtasks, constraint families, and difficulty factors. Guided by this taxonomy, a constraint-driven synthesis pipeline instantiates self-contained planning problems with adaptive difficulty control, quality filtering, and instance-level verification checklists. This shifts planning data construction from fixed benchmark collection to controllable generation while preserving realistic task grounding. We use PlanningBench to evaluate open-source and closed-source frontier LLMs, and find that current models still struggle to produce complete solutions under coupled constraints. Beyond evaluation, reinforcement learning on verified PlanningBench data improves performance on unseen planning benchmarks and broader instruction-following tasks. Further analysis suggests that determinate or well-specified optimal solutions provide clearer reward signals and more stable training dynamics. Overall, PlanningBench provides a controllable source of planning data for diagnosing and improving generalizable planning abilities in LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, enabling them to solve various complex problems. Recently, this ability has been applied to the paradigm of tool learning. Tool learning involves providing examples of tool usage and their corresponding functions, allowing LLMs to formulate plans and demonstrate the process of invoking and executing each tool. LLMs can address tasks that they cannot complete independently, thereby enhancing their potential across different tasks. However, this approach faces two key challenges. First, redundant error correction leads to unstable planning and long execution time. Additionally, designing a correct plan among multiple tools is also a challenge in tool learning. To address these issues, we propose Tool-Planner, a task-processing framework based on toolkits. Tool-Planner groups tools based on the API functions with the same function into a toolkit and allows LLMs to implement planning across the various toolkits. When a tool error occurs, the language model can reselect and adjust tools based on the toolkit. Experiments show that our approach demonstrates a high pass and win rate across different datasets and optimizes the planning scheme for tool learning in models such as GPT-4 and Claude 3, showcasing the potential of our method.

Automated Planning and Scheduling is among the growing areas in Artificial Intelligence (AI) where mention of LLMs has gained popularity. Based on a comprehensive review of 126 papers, this paper investigates eight categories based on the unique applications of LLMs in addressing various aspects of planning problems: language translation, plan generation, model construction, multi-agent planning, interactive planning, heuristics optimization, tool integration, and brain-inspired planning. For each category, we articulate the issues considered and existing gaps. A critical insight resulting from our review is that the true potential of LLMs unfolds when they are integrated with traditional symbolic planners, pointing towards a promising neuro-symbolic approach. This approach effectively combines the generative aspects of LLMs with the precision of classical planning methods. By synthesizing insights from existing literature, we underline the potential of this integration to address complex planning challenges. Our goal is to encourage the ICAPS community to recognize the complementary strengths of LLMs and symbolic planners, advocating for a direction in automated planning that leverages these synergistic capabilities to develop more advanced and intelligent planning systems.

LLMs have immense potential for generating plans, transforming an initial world state into a desired goal state. A large body of research has explored the use of LLMs for various planning tasks, from web navigation to travel planning and database querying. However, many of these systems are tailored to specific problems, making it challenging to compare them or determine the best approach for new tasks. There is also a lack of clear and consistent evaluation criteria. Our survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current LLM planners to fill this gap. It builds on foundational work by Kartam and Wilkins (1990) and examines six key performance criteria: completeness, executability, optimality, representation, generalization, and efficiency. For each, we provide a thorough analysis of representative works and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper also identifies crucial future directions, making it a valuable resource for both practitioners and newcomers interested in leveraging LLM planning to support agentic workflows.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant intelligence, the progress to leverage LLMs as planning modules of autonomous agents has attracted more attention. This survey provides the first systematic view of LLM-based agents planning, covering recent works aiming to improve planning ability. We provide a taxonomy of existing works on LLM-Agent planning, which can be categorized into Task Decomposition, Plan Selection, External Module, Reflection and Memory. Comprehensive analyses are conducted for each direction, and further challenges for the field of research are discussed.

Document structure analysis (aka document layout analysis) is crucial for understanding the physical layout and logical structure of documents, with applications in information retrieval, document summarization, knowledge extraction, etc. In this paper, we concentrate on Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis (HDSA) to explore hierarchical relationships within structured documents created using authoring software employing hierarchical schemas, such as LaTeX, Microsoft Word, and HTML. To comprehensively analyze hierarchical document structures, we propose a tree construction based approach that addresses multiple subtasks concurrently, including page object detection (Detect), reading order prediction of identified objects (Order), and the construction of intended hierarchical structure (Construct). We present an effective end-to-end solution based on this framework to demonstrate its performance. To assess our approach, we develop a comprehensive benchmark called Comp-HRDoc, which evaluates the above subtasks simultaneously. Our end-to-end system achieves state-of-the-art performance on two large-scale document layout analysis datasets (PubLayNet and DocLayNet), a high-quality hierarchical document structure reconstruction dataset (HRDoc), and our Comp-HRDoc benchmark. The Comp-HRDoc benchmark will be released to facilitate further research in this field.

Real-world multi-modal problems are rarely solved by a single machine learning model, and often require multi-step computational plans that involve stitching several models. Tool-augmented LLMs hold tremendous promise for automating the generation of such computational plans. However, the lack of standardized benchmarks for evaluating LLMs as planners for multi-step multi-modal tasks has prevented a systematic study of planner design decisions. Should LLMs generate a full plan in a single shot or step-by-step? Should they invoke tools directly with Python code or through structured data formats like JSON? Does feedback improve planning? To answer these questions and more, we introduce m&m's: a benchmark containing 4K+ multi-step multi-modal tasks involving 33 tools that include multi-modal models, (free) public APIs, and image processing modules. For each of these task queries, we provide automatically generated plans using this realistic toolset. We further provide a high-quality subset of 1,565 task plans that are human-verified and correctly executable. With m&m's, we evaluate 6 popular LLMs with 2 planning strategies (multi-step vs. step-by-step planning), 2 plan formats (JSON vs. code), and 3 types of feedback (parsing/verification/execution). Finally, we summarize takeaways from our extensive experiments. Our dataset and code are available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/zixianma/mnms) and Github (https://github.com/RAIVNLab/mnms).

Planning the layout of bicycle-sharing stations is a complex process, especially in cities where bicycle sharing systems are just being implemented. Urban planners often have to make a lot of estimates based on both publicly available data and privately provided data from the administration and then use the Location-Allocation model popular in the field. Many municipalities in smaller cities may have difficulty hiring specialists to carry out such planning. This thesis proposes a new solution to streamline and facilitate the process of such planning by using spatial embedding methods. Based only on publicly available data from OpenStreetMap, and station layouts from 34 cities in Europe, a method has been developed to divide cities into micro-regions using the Uber H3 discrete global grid system and to indicate regions where it is worth placing a station based on existing systems in different cities using transfer learning. The result of the work is a mechanism to support planners in their decision making when planning a station layout with a choice of reference cities.

We introduce Planning-guided Retrieval Augmented Generation (PlantimesRAG), a novel framework that augments the retrieve-then-reason paradigm of existing RAG frameworks to plan-then-retrieve. PlantimesRAG formulates a reasoning plan as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), decomposing queries into interrelated atomic sub-queries. Answer generation follows the DAG structure, allowing significant gains in efficiency through parallelized retrieval and generation. While state-of-the-art RAG solutions require extensive data generation and fine-tuning of language models (LMs), PlantimesRAG incorporates frozen LMs as plug-and-play experts to generate high-quality answers. Compared to existing RAG solutions, PlantimesRAG demonstrates significant improvements in reducing hallucinations and bolstering attribution due to its structured sub-query decomposition. Overall, PlantimesRAG offers a new perspective on integrating external knowledge in LMs while ensuring attribution by design, contributing towards more reliable LM-based systems.

In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requires precise and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of the tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider the proximity to the current agent when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient. To this end, we propose "Describe, Explain, Plan and Select" (DEPS), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach helps with better error correction from the feedback during the long-haul planning, while also bringing the sense of proximity via goal Selector, a learnable module that ranks parallel sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion and improves the original plan accordingly. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly doubles the overall performances. Finally, the ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the ObtainDiamond grand challenge with our approach. The code is released at https://github.com/CraftJarvis/MC-Planner.

In this paper, we propose a unified layout planning and image generation model, PlanGen, which can pre-plan spatial layout conditions before generating images. Unlike previous diffusion-based models that treat layout planning and layout-to-image as two separate models, PlanGen jointly models the two tasks into one autoregressive transformer using only next-token prediction. PlanGen integrates layout conditions into the model as context without requiring specialized encoding of local captions and bounding box coordinates, which provides significant advantages over the previous embed-and-pool operations on layout conditions, particularly when dealing with complex layouts. Unified prompting allows PlanGen to perform multitasking training related to layout, including layout planning, layout-to-image generation, image layout understanding, etc. In addition, PlanGen can be seamlessly expanded to layout-guided image manipulation thanks to the well-designed modeling, with teacher-forcing content manipulation policy and negative layout guidance. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our PlanGen in multiple layoutrelated tasks, showing its great potential. Code is available at: https://360cvgroup.github.io/PlanGen.

Recent research on Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to remarkable advancements in general NLP AI assistants. Some studies have further explored the use of LLMs for planning and invoking models or APIs to address more general multi-modal user queries. Despite this progress, complex visual-based tasks still remain challenging due to the diverse nature of visual tasks. This diversity is reflected in two aspects: 1) Reasoning paths. For many real-life applications, it is hard to accurately decompose a query simply by examining the query itself. Planning based on the specific visual content and the results of each step is usually required. 2) Flexible inputs and intermediate results. Input forms could be flexible for in-the-wild cases, and involves not only a single image or video but a mixture of videos and images, e.g., a user-view image with some reference videos. Besides, a complex reasoning process will also generate diverse multimodal intermediate results, e.g., video narrations, segmented video clips, etc. To address such general cases, we propose a multi-modal AI assistant, AssistGPT, with an interleaved code and language reasoning approach called Plan, Execute, Inspect, and Learn (PEIL) to integrate LLMs with various tools. Specifically, the Planner is capable of using natural language to plan which tool in Executor should do next based on the current reasoning progress. Inspector is an efficient memory manager to assist the Planner to feed proper visual information into a specific tool. Finally, since the entire reasoning process is complex and flexible, a Learner is designed to enable the model to autonomously explore and discover the optimal solution. We conducted experiments on A-OKVQA and NExT-QA benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results. Moreover, showcases demonstrate the ability of our system to handle questions far more complex than those found in the benchmarks.

In this paper, we present the findings of our Project ALPINE which stands for ``Autoregressive Learning for Planning In NEtworks." Project ALPINE initiates a theoretical investigation into the development of planning capabilities in Transformer-based language models through their autoregressive learning mechanisms, aiming to identify any potential limitations in their planning abilities. We abstract planning as a network path-finding task where the objective is to generate a valid path from a specified source node to a designated target node. In terms of expressiveness, we show that the Transformer is capable of executing path-finding by embedding the adjacency and reachability matrices within its weights. Our theoretical analysis of the gradient-based learning dynamic of the Transformer reveals that the Transformer is capable of learning both the adjacency matrix and a limited form of the reachability matrix. These theoretical insights are then validated through experiments, which demonstrate that the Transformer indeed learns the adjacency matrix and an incomplete reachability matrix, which aligns with the predictions made in our theoretical analysis. Additionally, when applying our methodology to a real-world planning benchmark, called Blocksworld, our observations remain consistent. Our theoretical and empirical analyses further unveil a potential limitation of Transformer in path-finding: it cannot identify reachability relationships through transitivity, and thus would fail when path concatenation is needed to generate a path. In summary, our findings shed new light on how the internal mechanisms of autoregressive learning enable planning in networks. This study may contribute to our understanding of the general planning capabilities in other related domains.

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed significant progress in recent years, with a notable focus on improving large language models' (LLM) performance through innovative prompting techniques. Among these, prompt engineering coupled with structures has emerged as a promising paradigm, with designs such as Chain-of-Thought, Tree of Thoughts, or Graph of Thoughts, in which the overall LLM reasoning is guided by a structure such as a graph. As illustrated with numerous examples, this paradigm significantly enhances the LLM's capability to solve numerous tasks, ranging from logical or mathematical reasoning to planning or creative writing. To facilitate the understanding of this growing field and pave the way for future developments, we devise a general blueprint for effective and efficient LLM reasoning schemes. For this, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the prompt execution pipeline, clarifying and clearly defining different concepts. We then build the first taxonomy of structure-enhanced LLM reasoning schemes. We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures, algorithms executed with these structures, and many others. We refer to these structures as reasoning topologies, because their representation becomes to a degree spatial, as they are contained within the LLM context. Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost. We also outline theoretical underpinnings, relationships between prompting and others parts of the LLM ecosystem such as knowledge bases, and the associated research challenges. Our work will help to advance future prompt engineering techniques.

Sparse roadmaps are important to compactly represent state spaces, to determine problems to be infeasible and to terminate in finite time. However, sparse roadmaps do not scale well to high-dimensional planning problems. In prior work, we showed improved planning performance on high-dimensional planning problems by using multilevel abstractions to simplify state spaces. In this work, we generalize sparse roadmaps to multilevel abstractions by developing a novel algorithm, the sparse multilevel roadmap planner (SMLR). To this end, we represent multilevel abstractions using the language of fiber bundles, and generalize sparse roadmap planners by using the concept of restriction sampling with visibility regions. We argue SMLR to be probabilistically complete and asymptotically near-optimal by inheritance from sparse roadmap planners. In evaluations, we outperform sparse roadmap planners on challenging planning problems, in particular problems which are high-dimensional, contain narrow passages or are infeasible. We thereby demonstrate sparse multilevel roadmaps as an efficient tool for feasible and infeasible high-dimensional planning problems.

Planning is central to LLM agents: before acting, an agent must decompose goals, select tools, reason over constraints, and decide when a task is infeasible. Yet existing agent evaluations often report only end-to-end success, making it difficult to determine whether failures stem from planning or execution. We introduce Agent Planning Benchmark (APB), a planning-specific diagnostic benchmark with 4,209 multimodal cases across 22 domains and five settings, covering holistic planning, feedback-conditioned step-wise planning, and robustness under extraneous tools, broken tools, and unsolvable tasks. Across 12 MLLMs, APB reveals systematic weaknesses in long-horizon planning, tool-noise robustness, calibrated refusal, and inference-time refinement. We further validate APB on 200 ToolSandbox tasks and 200 τ^2-bench tasks, where APB-guided refinement consistently improves plan correctness, plan grade, and downstream execution metrics across three representative models. APB thus serves as an upstream diagnostic complement to execution benchmarks. The APB benchmark and code are available in https://github.com/Mikivishy/AgentPlanningBenchmark{this URL}.

In the field of urban planning, general-purpose large language models often struggle to meet the specific needs of planners. Tasks like generating urban planning texts, retrieving related information, and evaluating planning documents pose unique challenges. To enhance the efficiency of urban professionals and overcome these obstacles, we introduce PlanGPT, the first specialized Large Language Model tailored for urban and spatial planning. Developed through collaborative efforts with institutions like the Chinese Academy of Urban Planning, PlanGPT leverages a customized local database retrieval framework, domain-specific fine-tuning of base models, and advanced tooling capabilities. Empirical tests demonstrate that PlanGPT has achieved advanced performance, delivering responses of superior quality precisely tailored to the intricacies of urban planning.

Generating plans of action, and reasoning about change have long been considered a core competence of intelligent agents. It is thus no surprise that evaluating the planning and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has become a hot topic of research. Most claims about LLM planning capabilities are however based on common sense tasks-where it becomes hard to tell whether LLMs are planning or merely retrieving from their vast world knowledge. There is a strong need for systematic and extensible planning benchmarks with sufficient diversity to evaluate whether LLMs have innate planning capabilities. Motivated by this, we propose PlanBench, an extensible benchmark suite based on the kinds of domains used in the automated planning community, especially in the International Planning Competition, to test the capabilities of LLMs in planning or reasoning about actions and change. PlanBench provides sufficient diversity in both the task domains and the specific planning capabilities. Our studies also show that on many critical capabilities-including plan generation-LLM performance falls quite short, even with the SOTA models. PlanBench can thus function as a useful marker of progress of LLMs in planning and reasoning.

Document structure analysis, aka document layout analysis, is crucial for understanding both the physical layout and logical structure of documents, serving information retrieval, document summarization, knowledge extraction, etc. Hierarchical Document Structure Analysis (HDSA) specifically aims to restore the hierarchical structure of documents created using authoring software with hierarchical schemas. Previous research has primarily followed two approaches: one focuses on tackling specific subtasks of HDSA in isolation, such as table detection or reading order prediction, while the other adopts a unified framework that uses multiple branches or modules, each designed to address a distinct task. In this work, we propose a unified relation prediction approach for HDSA, called UniHDSA, which treats various HDSA sub-tasks as relation prediction problems and consolidates relation prediction labels into a unified label space. This allows a single relation prediction module to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, whether at a page-level or document-level structure analysis. To validate the effectiveness of UniHDSA, we develop a multimodal end-to-end system based on Transformer architectures. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a hierarchical document structure analysis benchmark, Comp-HRDoc, and competitive results on a large-scale document layout analysis dataset, DocLayNet, effectively illustrating the superiority of our method across all sub-tasks. The Comp-HRDoc benchmark and UniHDSA's configurations are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/CompHRDoc.

As Large Language Model (LLM) agents become increasingly capable of automating complex, multi-step tasks, the need for robust, secure, and predictable architectural patterns is paramount. This paper provides a comprehensive guide to the ``Plan-then-Execute'' (P-t-E) pattern, an agentic design that separates strategic planning from tactical execution. We explore the foundational principles of P-t-E, detailing its core components - the Planner and the Executor - and its architectural advantages in predictability, cost-efficiency, and reasoning quality over reactive patterns like ReAct (Reason + Act). A central focus is placed on the security implications of this design, particularly its inherent resilience to indirect prompt injection attacks by establishing control-flow integrity. We argue that while P-t-E provides a strong foundation, a defense-in-depth strategy is necessary, and we detail essential complementary controls such as the Principle of Least Privilege, task-scoped tool access, and sandboxed code execution. To make these principles actionable, this guide provides detailed implementation blueprints and working code references for three leading agentic frameworks: LangChain (via LangGraph), CrewAI, and AutoGen. Each framework's approach to implementing the P-t-E pattern is analyzed, highlighting unique features like LangGraph's stateful graphs for re-planning, CrewAI's declarative tool scoping for security, and AutoGen's built-in Docker sandboxing. Finally, we discuss advanced patterns, including dynamic re-planning loops, parallel execution with Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), and the critical role of Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) verification, to offer a complete strategic blueprint for architects, developers, and security engineers aiming to build production-grade, resilient, and trustworthy LLM agents.

Effective planning is essential for the success of any task, from organizing a vacation to routing autonomous vehicles and developing corporate strategies. It involves setting goals, formulating plans, and allocating resources to achieve them. LLMs are particularly well-suited for automated planning due to their strong capabilities in commonsense reasoning. They can deduce a sequence of actions needed to achieve a goal from a given state and identify an effective course of action. However, it is frequently observed that plans generated through direct prompting often fail upon execution. Our survey aims to highlight the existing challenges in planning with language models, focusing on key areas such as embodied environments, optimal scheduling, competitive and cooperative games, task decomposition, reasoning, and planning. Through this study, we explore how LLMs transform AI planning and provide unique insights into the future of LM-assisted planning.

Planning has become a central capability for contemporary agent systems in navigating complex, long-horizon tasks, yet existing approaches predominantly rely on fixed, hand-crafted planning structures that lack the flexibility to adapt to the structural diversity of open-ended problems. To address this limitation, we introduce TodoEvolve, a meta-planning paradigm that autonomously synthesizes and dynamically revises task-specific planning architectures. Specifically, we first construct PlanFactory, a modular design space that standardizes diverse planning paradigms within a unified codebase encompassing topology, initialization, adaptation, and navigation, thereby providing a common interface for heterogeneous planning patterns. Leveraging PlanFactory, we collect high-quality planning trajectories and train Todo-14B via Impedance-Guided Preference Optimization (IGPO), a multi-objective reinforcement learning objective that encourages the generation of planning systems that are performant, stable, and token-efficient across arbitrary tasks and agent backbones. Empirical evaluations on five agentic benchmarks demonstrate that TodoEvolve consistently surpasses carefully engineered planning modules while maintaining economical API costs and runtime overhead.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in planning the use of various functional tools, such as calculators and retrievers, particularly in question-answering tasks. In this paper, we expand the definition of these tools, centering on conceptual tools within the context of dialogue systems. A conceptual tool specifies a cognitive concept that aids systematic or investigative thought. These conceptual tools play important roles in practice, such as multiple psychological or tutoring strategies being dynamically applied in a single turn to compose helpful responses. To further enhance the reasoning and planning capability of LLMs with these conceptual tools, we introduce a multi-persona collaboration framework: Think-Plan-Execute (TPE). This framework decouples the response generation process into three distinct roles: Thinker, Planner, and Executor. Specifically, the Thinker analyzes the internal status exhibited in the dialogue context, such as user emotions and preferences, to formulate a global guideline. The Planner then generates executable plans to call different conceptual tools (e.g., sources or strategies), while the Executor compiles all intermediate results into a coherent response. This structured approach not only enhances the explainability and controllability of responses but also reduces token redundancy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TPE across various dialogue response generation tasks, including multi-source (FoCus) and multi-strategy interactions (CIMA and PsyQA). This reveals its potential to handle real-world dialogue interactions that require more complicated tool learning beyond just functional tools. The full code and data will be released for reproduction.

Graphic design generation demands a delicate balance between high visual fidelity and fine-grained structural editability. However, existing approaches typically bifurcate into either non-editable raster image synthesis or abstract layout generation devoid of visual content. Recent combinations of these two approaches attempt to bridge this gap but often suffer from rigid composition schemas and unresolvable visual dissonances (e.g., text-background conflicts) due to their inexpressive representation and open-loop nature. To address these challenges, we propose DesignAsCode, a novel framework that reimagines graphic design as a programmatic synthesis task using HTML/CSS. Specifically, we introduce a Plan-Implement-Reflect pipeline, incorporating a Semantic Planner to construct dynamic, variable-depth element hierarchies and a Visual-Aware Reflection mechanism that iteratively optimizes the code to rectify rendering artifacts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DesignAsCode significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in both structural validity and aesthetic quality. Furthermore, our code-native representation unlocks advanced capabilities, including automatic layout retargeting, complex document generation (e.g., resumes), and CSS-based animation.

Software engineering activities such as package migration, fixing errors reports from static analysis or testing, and adding type annotations or other specifications to a codebase, involve pervasively editing the entire repository of code. We formulate these activities as repository-level coding tasks. Recent tools like GitHub Copilot, which are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), have succeeded in offering high-quality solutions to localized coding problems. Repository-level coding tasks are more involved and cannot be solved directly using LLMs, since code within a repository is inter-dependent and the entire repository may be too large to fit into the prompt. We frame repository-level coding as a planning problem and present a task-agnostic framework, called CodePlan to solve it. CodePlan synthesizes a multi-step chain of edits (plan), where each step results in a call to an LLM on a code location with context derived from the entire repository, previous code changes and task-specific instructions. CodePlan is based on a novel combination of an incremental dependency analysis, a change may-impact analysis and an adaptive planning algorithm. We evaluate the effectiveness of CodePlan on two repository-level tasks: package migration (C#) and temporal code edits (Python). Each task is evaluated on multiple code repositories, each of which requires inter-dependent changes to many files (between 2-97 files). Coding tasks of this level of complexity have not been automated using LLMs before. Our results show that CodePlan has better match with the ground truth compared to baselines. CodePlan is able to get 5/6 repositories to pass the validity checks (e.g., to build without errors and make correct code edits) whereas the baselines (without planning but with the same type of contextual information as CodePlan) cannot get any of the repositories to pass them.

AI has proven highly successful at urban planning analysis -- learning patterns from data to predict future conditions. The next frontier is AI-assisted decision-making: agents that recommend sites, allocate resources, and evaluate trade-offs while reasoning transparently about constraints and stakeholder values. Recent breakthroughs in reasoning AI -- CoT prompting, ReAct, and multi-agent collaboration frameworks -- now make this vision achievable. This position paper presents the Agentic Urban Planning AI Framework for reasoning-capable planning agents that integrates three cognitive layers (Perception, Foundation, Reasoning) with six logic components (Analysis, Generation, Verification, Evaluation, Collaboration, Decision) through a multi-agents collaboration framework. We demonstrate why planning decisions require explicit reasoning capabilities that are value-based (applying normative principles), rule-grounded (guaranteeing constraint satisfaction), and explainable (generating transparent justifications) -- requirements that statistical learning alone cannot fulfill. We compare reasoning agents with statistical learning, present a comprehensive architecture with benchmark evaluation metrics, and outline critical research challenges. This framework shows how AI agents can augment human planners by systematically exploring solution spaces, verifying regulatory compliance, and deliberating over trade-offs transparently -- not replacing human judgment but amplifying it with computational reasoning capabilities.

Large language model (LLM)-based systems are becoming increasingly popular for solving tasks by constructing executable workflows that interleave LLM calls, information retrieval, tool use, code execution, memory updates, and verification. This survey reviews recent methods for designing and optimizing such workflows, which we treat as agentic computation graphs (ACGs). We organize the literature based on when workflow structure is determined, where structure refers to which components or agents are present, how they depend on each other, and how information flows between them. This lens distinguishes static methods, which fix a reusable workflow scaffold before deployment, from dynamic methods, which select, generate, or revise the workflow for a particular run before or during execution. We further organize prior work along three dimensions: when structure is determined, what part of the workflow is optimized, and which evaluation signals guide optimization (e.g., task metrics, verifier signals, preferences, or trace-derived feedback). We also distinguish reusable workflow templates, run-specific realized graphs, and execution traces, separating reusable design choices from the structures actually deployed in a given run and from realized runtime behavior. Finally, we outline a structure-aware evaluation perspective that complements downstream task metrics with graph-level properties, execution cost, robustness, and structural variation across inputs. Our goal is to provide a clear vocabulary, a unified framework for positioning new methods, a more comparable view of existing body of literature, and a more reproducible evaluation standard for future work in workflow optimizations for LLM agents.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional abilities in reasoning for task planning. However, challenges remain under-explored for parallel schedules. This paper introduces a novel paradigm, plan-over-graph, in which the model first decomposes a real-life textual task into executable subtasks and constructs an abstract task graph. The model then understands this task graph as input and generates a plan for parallel execution. To enhance the planning capability of complex, scalable graphs, we design an automated and controllable pipeline to generate synthetic graphs and propose a two-stage training scheme. Experimental results show that our plan-over-graph method significantly improves task performance on both API-based LLMs and trainable open-sourced LLMs. By normalizing complex tasks as graphs, our method naturally supports parallel execution, demonstrating global efficiency. The code and data are available at https://github.com/zsq259/Plan-over-Graph.

We present the first mechanistic evidence that model-free reinforcement learning agents can learn to plan. This is achieved by applying a methodology based on concept-based interpretability to a model-free agent in Sokoban -- a commonly used benchmark for studying planning. Specifically, we demonstrate that DRC, a generic model-free agent introduced by Guez et al. (2019), uses learned concept representations to internally formulate plans that both predict the long-term effects of actions on the environment and influence action selection. Our methodology involves: (1) probing for planning-relevant concepts, (2) investigating plan formation within the agent's representations, and (3) verifying that discovered plans (in the agent's representations) have a causal effect on the agent's behavior through interventions. We also show that the emergence of these plans coincides with the emergence of a planning-like property: the ability to benefit from additional test-time compute. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis of the planning algorithm learned by the agent and discover a strong resemblance to parallelized bidirectional search. Our findings advance understanding of the internal mechanisms underlying planning behavior in agents, which is important given the recent trend of emergent planning and reasoning capabilities in LLMs through RL

Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in tackling complex reasoning tasks, achieving notable success in domains like mathematical and logical reasoning. However, these methods encounter challenges with complex planning tasks, primarily due to extended reasoning steps, diverse constraints, and the challenge of handling multiple distinct sub-tasks. To address these challenges, we propose HyperTree Planning (HTP), a novel reasoning paradigm that constructs hypertree-structured planning outlines for effective planning. The hypertree structure enables LLMs to engage in hierarchical thinking by flexibly employing the divide-and-conquer strategy, effectively breaking down intricate reasoning steps, accommodating diverse constraints, and managing multiple distinct sub-tasks in a well-organized manner. We further introduce an autonomous planning framework that completes the planning process by iteratively refining and expanding the hypertree-structured planning outlines. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of HTP, achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on the TravelPlanner benchmark with Gemini-1.5-Pro, resulting in a 3.6 times performance improvement over o1-preview.

Although large language models have demonstrated impressive ability in code generation, they are still struggling to address the complicated intent provided by humans. It is widely acknowledged that humans typically employ planning to decompose complex problems and schedule the solution steps prior to implementation. Thus we introduce planning into code generation to help the model understand complex intent and reduce the difficulty of problem solving. This paper proposes a self-planning code generation method with large language model, which consists of two phases, namely planning phase and implementation phase. Specifically, in the planning phase, the language model plans out the solution steps from the intent combined with in-context learning. Then it enters the implementation phase, where the model generates code step by step, guided by the solution steps. The effectiveness of self-planning code generation has been rigorously evaluated on multiple code generation datasets and the results have demonstrated a marked superiority over naive direct generation approaches with language model. The improvement in performance is substantial, highlighting the significance of self-planning in code generation tasks.

Sequential decision making, commonly formalized as Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization, is a important challenge in artificial intelligence. Two key approaches to this problem are reinforcement learning (RL) and planning. This paper presents a survey of the integration of both fields, better known as model-based reinforcement learning. Model-based RL has two main steps. First, we systematically cover approaches to dynamics model learning, including challenges like dealing with stochasticity, uncertainty, partial observability, and temporal abstraction. Second, we present a systematic categorization of planning-learning integration, including aspects like: where to start planning, what budgets to allocate to planning and real data collection, how to plan, and how to integrate planning in the learning and acting loop. After these two sections, we also discuss implicit model-based RL as an end-to-end alternative for model learning and planning, and we cover the potential benefits of model-based RL. Along the way, the survey also draws connections to several related RL fields, like hierarchical RL and transfer learning. Altogether, the survey presents a broad conceptual overview of the combination of planning and learning for MDP optimization.

Layout Analysis (the identification of zones and their classification) is the first step along line segmentation in Optical Character Recognition and similar tasks. The ability of identifying main body of text from marginal text or running titles makes the difference between extracting the work full text of a digitized book and noisy outputs. We show that most segmenters focus on pixel classification and that polygonization of this output has not been used as a target for the latest competition on historical document (ICDAR 2017 and onwards), despite being the focus in the early 2010s. We propose to shift, for efficiency, the task from a pixel classification-based polygonization to an object detection using isothetic rectangles. We compare the output of Kraken and YOLOv5 in terms of segmentation and show that the later severely outperforms the first on small datasets (1110 samples and below). We release two datasets for training and evaluation on historical documents as well as a new package, YALTAi, which injects YOLOv5 in the segmentation pipeline of Kraken 4.1.

Robotic instruction following tasks require seamless integration of visual perception, task planning, target localization, and motion execution. However, existing task planning methods for instruction following are either data-driven or underperform in zero-shot scenarios due to difficulties in grounding lengthy instructions into actionable plans under operational constraints. To address this, we propose FlowPlan, a structured multi-stage LLM workflow that elevates zero-shot pipeline and bridges the performance gap between zero-shot and data-driven in-context learning methods. By decomposing the planning process into modular stages--task information retrieval, language-level reasoning, symbolic-level planning, and logical evaluation--FlowPlan generates logically coherent action sequences while adhering to operational constraints and further extracts contextual guidance for precise instance-level target localization. Benchmarked on the ALFRED and validated in real-world applications, our method achieves competitive performance relative to data-driven in-context learning methods and demonstrates adaptability across diverse environments. This work advances zero-shot task planning in robotic systems without reliance on labeled data. Project website: https://instruction-following-project.github.io/.

While large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong potential in solving planning problems, there is a trade-off between flexibility and complexity. LLMs, as zero-shot planners themselves, are still not capable of directly generating valid plans for complex planning problems such as multi-constraint or long-horizon tasks. On the other hand, many frameworks aiming to solve complex planning problems often rely on task-specific preparatory efforts, such as task-specific in-context examples and pre-defined critics/verifiers, which limits their cross-task generalization capability. In this paper, we tackle these challenges by observing that the core of many planning problems lies in optimization problems: searching for the optimal solution (best plan) with goals subject to constraints (preconditions and effects of decisions). With LLMs' commonsense, reasoning, and programming capabilities, this opens up the possibilities of a universal LLM-based approach to planning problems. Inspired by this observation, we propose LLMFP, a general-purpose framework that leverages LLMs to capture key information from planning problems and formally formulate and solve them as optimization problems from scratch, with no task-specific examples needed. We apply LLMFP to 9 planning problems, ranging from multi-constraint decision making to multi-step planning problems, and demonstrate that LLMFP achieves on average 83.7% and 86.8% optimal rate across 9 tasks for GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, significantly outperforming the best baseline (direct planning with OpenAI o1-preview) with 37.6% and 40.7% improvements. We also validate components of LLMFP with ablation experiments and analyzed the underlying success and failure reasons.

This paper studies close-loop task planning, which refers to the process of generating a sequence of skills (a plan) to accomplish a specific goal while adapting the plan based on real-time observations. Recently, prompting Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate actions iteratively has become a prevalent paradigm due to its superior performance and user-friendliness. However, this paradigm is plagued by two inefficiencies: high token consumption and redundant error correction, both of which hinder its scalability for large-scale testing and applications. To address these issues, we propose Tree-Planner, which reframes task planning with LLMs into three distinct phases: plan sampling, action tree construction, and grounded deciding. Tree-Planner starts by using an LLM to sample a set of potential plans before execution, followed by the aggregation of them to form an action tree. Finally, the LLM performs a top-down decision-making process on the tree, taking into account real-time environmental information. Experiments show that Tree-Planner achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining high efficiency. By decomposing LLM queries into a single plan-sampling call and multiple grounded-deciding calls, a considerable part of the prompt are less likely to be repeatedly consumed. As a result, token consumption is reduced by 92.2% compared to the previously best-performing model. Additionally, by enabling backtracking on the action tree as needed, the correction process becomes more flexible, leading to a 40.5% decrease in error corrections. Project page: https://tree-planner.github.io/

Large Language Models have been shown to fail to create executable and verifiable plans in grounded environments. An emerging line of work shows success in using LLM as a formalizer to generate a formal representation (e.g., PDDL) of the planning domain, which can be deterministically solved to find a plan. We systematically evaluate this methodology while bridging some major gaps. While previous work only generates a partial PDDL representation given templated and thus unrealistic environment descriptions, we generate the complete representation given descriptions of various naturalness levels. Among an array of observations critical to improve LLMs' formal planning ability, we note that large enough models can effectively formalize descriptions as PDDL, outperforming those directly generating plans, while being robust to lexical perturbation. As the descriptions become more natural-sounding, we observe a decrease in performance and provide detailed error analysis.

Large language models (LLMs) present intriguing opportunities to enhance user interaction with traditional algorithms and tools in real-world applications. An advanced planning system (APS) is a sophisticated software that leverages optimization to help operations planners create, interpret, and modify an operational plan. While highly beneficial, many customers are priced out of using an APS due to the ongoing costs of consultants responsible for customization and maintenance. To address the need for a more accessible APS expressed by supply chain planners, we present SmartAPS, a conversational system built on a tool-augmented LLM. Our system provides operations planners with an intuitive natural language chat interface, allowing them to query information, perform counterfactual reasoning, receive recommendations, and execute scenario analysis to better manage their operation. A short video demonstrating the system has been released: https://youtu.be/KtIrJjlDbyw

Text-to-image (T2I) generation has seen significant growth over the past few years. Despite this, there has been little work on generating diagrams with T2I models. A diagram is a symbolic/schematic representation that explains information using structurally rich and spatially complex visualizations (e.g., a dense combination of related objects, text labels, directional arrows, connection lines, etc.). Existing state-of-the-art T2I models often fail at diagram generation because they lack fine-grained object layout control when many objects are densely connected via complex relations such as arrows/lines and also often fail to render comprehensible text labels. To address this gap, we present DiagrammerGPT, a novel two-stage text-to-diagram generation framework that leverages the layout guidance capabilities of LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to generate more accurate open-domain, open-platform diagrams. In the first stage, we use LLMs to generate and iteratively refine 'diagram plans' (in a planner-auditor feedback loop) which describe all the entities (objects and text labels), their relationships (arrows or lines), and their bounding box layouts. In the second stage, we use a diagram generator, DiagramGLIGEN, and a text label rendering module to generate diagrams following the diagram plans. To benchmark the text-to-diagram generation task, we introduce AI2D-Caption, a densely annotated diagram dataset built on top of the AI2D dataset. We show quantitatively and qualitatively that our DiagrammerGPT framework produces more accurate diagrams, outperforming existing T2I models. We also provide comprehensive analysis including open-domain diagram generation, vector graphic diagram generation in different platforms, human-in-the-loop diagram plan editing, and multimodal planner/auditor LLMs (e.g., GPT-4Vision). We hope our work can inspire further research on diagram generation via T2I models and LLMs.

In our pursuit of advancing multi-modal AI assistants capable of guiding users to achieve complex multi-step goals, we propose the task of "Visual Planning for Assistance (VPA)". Given a succinct natural language goal, e.g., "make a shelf", and a video of the user's progress so far, the aim of VPA is to devise a plan, i.e., a sequence of actions such as "sand shelf", "paint shelf", etc. to realize the specified goal. This requires assessing the user's progress from the (untrimmed) video, and relating it to the requirements of natural language goal, i.e., which actions to select and in what order? Consequently, this requires handling long video history and arbitrarily complex action dependencies. To address these challenges, we decompose VPA into video action segmentation and forecasting. Importantly, we experiment by formulating the forecasting step as a multi-modal sequence modeling problem, allowing us to leverage the strength of pre-trained LMs (as the sequence model). This novel approach, which we call Visual Language Model based Planner (VLaMP), outperforms baselines across a suite of metrics that gauge the quality of the generated plans. Furthermore, through comprehensive ablations, we also isolate the value of each component--language pre-training, visual observations, and goal information. We have open-sourced all the data, model checkpoints, and training code.

We present Plancraft, a multi-modal evaluation dataset for LLM agents. Plancraft has both a text-only and multi-modal interface, based on the Minecraft crafting GUI. We include the Minecraft Wiki to evaluate tool use and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), as well as an oracle planner and oracle RAG information extractor, to ablate the different components of a modern agent architecture. To evaluate decision-making, Plancraft also includes a subset of examples that are intentionally unsolvable, providing a realistic challenge that requires the agent not only to complete tasks but also to decide whether they are solvable at all. We benchmark both open-source and closed-source LLMs and strategies on our task and compare their performance to a handcrafted planner. We find that LLMs and VLMs struggle with the planning problems that Plancraft introduces, and we offer suggestions on how to improve their capabilities.

Automated planning using a symbolic planning language, such as PDDL, is a general approach to producing optimal plans to achieve a stated goal. However, creating suitable machine understandable descriptions of the planning domain, problem, and goal requires expertise in the planning language, limiting the utility of these tools for non-expert humans. Recent efforts have explored utilizing a symbolic planner in conjunction with a large language model to generate plans from natural language descriptions given by a non-expert human (LLM+PDDL). Our approach performs initial translation of goal specifications to a set of PDDL goal constraints using an LLM; such translations often result in imprecise symbolic specifications, which are difficult to validate directly. We account for this using an evolutionary approach to generate a population of symbolic goal specifications with slight differences from the initial translation, and utilize a trained LSTM-based validation model to assess whether each induced plan in the population adheres to the natural language specifications. We evaluate our approach on a collection of prototypical specifications in a notional naval disaster recovery task, and demonstrate that our evolutionary approach improve adherence of generated plans to natural language specifications when compared to plans generated using only LLM translations. The code for our method can be found at https://github.com/owenonline/PlanCritic.

The ability to observe the effects of actions performed by others and to infer their intent, most likely goals, or course of action, is known as a plan or intention recognition cognitive capability and has long been one of the fundamental research challenges in AI. Deep learning has recently been making significant inroads on various pattern recognition problems, except for intention recognition. While extensively explored since the seventies, the problem remains unsolved for most interesting cases in various areas, ranging from natural language understanding to human behavior understanding based on video feeds. This paper compares symbolic inverse planning, one of the most investigated approaches to goal recognition, to deep learning using CNN and LTSM neural network architectures, on five synthetic benchmarks often used in the literature. The results show that the deep learning approach achieves better goal-prediction accuracy and timeliness than the symbolic cost-based plan recognizer in these domains. Although preliminary, these results point to interesting future research avenues.

Understanding the physical structure is essential for real-world applications such as embodied agents, interactive design, and long-horizon manipulation. Yet, prevailing Vision-Language Model (VLM) evaluations still center on structure-agnostic, single-turn setups (e.g., VQA), which fail to assess agents' ability to reason about how geometry, contact, and support relations jointly constrain what actions are possible in a dynamic environment. To address this gap, we introduce the Causal Hierarchy of Actions and Interactions (CHAIN) benchmark, an interactive 3D, physics-driven testbed designed to evaluate whether models can understand, plan, and execute structured action sequences grounded in physical constraints. CHAIN shifts evaluation from passive perception to active problem solving, spanning tasks such as interlocking mechanical puzzles and 3D stacking and packing. We conduct a comprehensive study of state-of-the-art VLMs and diffusion-based models under unified interactive settings. Our results show that top-performing models still struggle to internalize physical structure and causal constraints, often failing to produce reliable long-horizon plans and cannot robustly translate perceived structure into effective actions. The project is available at https://social-ai-studio.github.io/CHAIN/.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization abilities: state-of-the-art chatbots can provide plausible answers to many common questions that arise in daily life. However, so far, LLMs cannot reliably solve long-horizon planning problems. By contrast, classical planners, once a problem is given in a formatted way, can use efficient search algorithms to quickly identify correct, or even optimal, plans. In an effort to get the best of both worlds, this paper introduces LLM+P, the first framework that incorporates the strengths of classical planners into LLMs. LLM+P takes in a natural language description of a planning problem, then returns a correct (or optimal) plan for solving that problem in natural language. LLM+P does so by first converting the language description into a file written in the planning domain definition language (PDDL), then leveraging classical planners to quickly find a solution, and then translating the found solution back into natural language. Along with LLM+P, we define a diverse set of different benchmark problems taken from common planning scenarios. Via a comprehensive set of experiments on these benchmark problems, we find that LLM+P is able to provide optimal solutions for most problems, while LLMs fail to provide even feasible plans for most problems.\footnote{The code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/Cranial-XIX/llm-pddl.git.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been the subject of active research, significantly advancing the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). From BERT to BLOOM, LLMs have surpassed state-of-the-art results in various natural language tasks such as question answering, summarization, and text generation. Many ongoing efforts focus on understanding LLMs' capabilities, including their knowledge of the world, syntax, and semantics. However, extending the textual prowess of LLMs to symbolic reasoning has been slow and predominantly focused on tackling problems related to the mathematical field. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs for automated planning - a branch of AI concerned with the realization of action sequences (plans) to achieve a goal, typically executed by intelligent agents, autonomous robots, and unmanned vehicles. We introduce Plansformer; an LLM fine-tuned on planning problems and capable of generating plans with favorable behavior in terms of correctness and length with reduced knowledge-engineering efforts. We also demonstrate the adaptability of Plansformer in solving different planning domains with varying complexities, owing to the transfer learning abilities of LLMs. For one configuration of Plansformer, we achieve ~97% valid plans, out of which ~95% are optimal for Towers of Hanoi - a puzzle-solving domain.

Planning is central to agents and agentic AI. The ability to plan, e.g., creating travel itineraries within a budget, holds immense potential in both scientific and commercial contexts. Moreover, optimal plans tend to require fewer resources compared to ad-hoc methods. To date, a comprehensive understanding of existing planning benchmarks appears to be lacking. Without it, comparing planning algorithms' performance across domains or selecting suitable algorithms for new scenarios remains challenging. In this paper, we examine a range of planning benchmarks to identify commonly used testbeds for algorithm development and highlight potential gaps. These benchmarks are categorized into embodied environments, web navigation, scheduling, games and puzzles, and everyday task automation. Our study recommends the most appropriate benchmarks for various algorithms and offers insights to guide future benchmark development.

Diffusion Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in visual synthesis, yet they often struggle with high-level semantic reasoning and long-horizon planning. This limitation frequently leads to visual hallucinations and mis-alignments with user instructions, especially in scenarios involving complex scene understanding, human-object interactions, multi-stage actions, and in-context motion reasoning. To address these challenges, we propose Plan-X, a framework that explicitly enforces high-level semantic planning to instruct video generation process. At its core lies a Semantic Planner, a learnable multimodal language model that reasons over the user's intent from both text prompts and visual context, and autoregressively generates a sequence of text-grounded spatio-temporal semantic tokens. These semantic tokens, complementary to high-level text prompt guidance, serve as structured "semantic sketches" over time for the video diffusion model, which has its strength at synthesizing high-fidelity visual details. Plan-X effectively integrates the strength of language models in multimodal in-context reasoning and planning, together with the strength of diffusion models in photorealistic video synthesis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework substantially reduces visual hallucinations and enables fine-grained, instruction-aligned video generation consistent with multimodal context.

Document layout analysis is a critical preprocessing step in document intelligence, enabling the detection and localization of structural elements such as titles, text blocks, tables, and formulas. Despite its importance, existing layout detection models face significant challenges in generalizing across diverse document types, handling complex layouts, and achieving real-time performance for large-scale data processing. To address these limitations, we present PP-DocLayout, which achieves high precision and efficiency in recognizing 23 types of layout regions across diverse document formats. To meet different needs, we offer three models of varying scales. PP-DocLayout-L is a high-precision model based on the RT-DETR-L detector, achieving 90.4% mAP@0.5 and an end-to-end inference time of 13.4 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-M is a balanced model, offering 75.2% mAP@0.5 with an inference time of 12.7 ms per page on a T4 GPU. PP-DocLayout-S is a high-efficiency model designed for resource-constrained environments and real-time applications, with an inference time of 8.1 ms per page on a T4 GPU and 14.5 ms on a CPU. This work not only advances the state of the art in document layout analysis but also provides a robust solution for constructing high-quality training data, enabling advancements in document intelligence and multimodal AI systems. Code and models are available at https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleX .

A long-standing challenge in AI is to develop agents capable of solving a wide range of physical tasks and generalizing to new, unseen tasks and environments. A popular recent approach involves training a world model from state-action trajectories and subsequently use it with a planning algorithm to solve new tasks. Planning is commonly performed in the input space, but a recent family of methods has introduced planning algorithms that optimize in the learned representation space of the world model, with the promise that abstracting irrelevant details yields more efficient planning. In this work, we characterize models from this family as JEPA-WMs and investigate the technical choices that make algorithms from this class work. We propose a comprehensive study of several key components with the objective of finding the optimal approach within the family. We conducted experiments using both simulated environments and real-world robotic data, and studied how the model architecture, the training objective, and the planning algorithm affect planning success. We combine our findings to propose a model that outperforms two established baselines, DINO-WM and V-JEPA-2-AC, in both navigation and manipulation tasks. Code, data and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/jepa-wms.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in isolated step-by-step reasoning tasks such as mathematics and programming, but their proficiency in long-horizon planning, where solutions require extended, structured sequences of interdependent actions, remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks typically assess LLMs through abstract or low-dimensional algorithmic tasks, failing to capture the complexity of realistic planning environments. We introduce HeroBench, a novel benchmark designed specifically to evaluate long-horizon planning and structured reasoning within complex RPG-inspired virtual worlds. HeroBench provides a rigorously constructed dataset of tasks covering a wide range of difficulties, a simulated environment to execute and validate agent plans, and detailed analytical tools for evaluating model performance. Tasks challenge models to formulate strategic plans, efficiently gather resources, master necessary skills, craft equipment, and defeat adversaries, reflecting practical scenarios' layered dependencies and constraints. Our extensive evaluation of 25 state-of-the-art LLMs, spanning both open-source and proprietary models, including the GPT-5 family, reveals substantial performance disparities rarely observed in conventional reasoning benchmarks. Detailed error analysis further uncovers specific weaknesses in current models' abilities to generate robust high-level plans and reliably execute structured actions. HeroBench thus not only significantly advances the evaluation of LLM reasoning but also provides a flexible, scalable foundation for future research into advanced, autonomous planning in virtual environments.

While agent evaluation has shifted toward long-horizon tasks, most benchmarks still emphasize local, step-level reasoning rather than the global constrained optimization (e.g., time and financial budgets) that demands genuine planning ability. Meanwhile, existing LLM planning benchmarks underrepresent the active information gathering and fine-grained local constraints typical of real-world settings. To address this, we introduce DeepPlanning, a challenging benchmark for practical long-horizon agent planning. It features multi-day travel planning and multi-product shopping tasks that require proactive information acquisition, local constrained reasoning, and global constrained optimization. Evaluations on DeepPlanning show that even frontier agentic LLMs struggle with these problems, highlighting the importance of reliable explicit reasoning patterns and parallel tool use for achieving better effectiveness-efficiency trade-offs. Error analysis further points to promising directions for improving agentic LLMs over long planning horizons. We open-source the code and data to support future research.

Recent diffusion-based image editing methods have significantly advanced text-guided tasks but often struggle to interpret complex, indirect instructions. Moreover, current models frequently suffer from poor identity preservation, unintended edits, or rely heavily on manual masks. To address these challenges, we introduce X-Planner, a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based planning system that effectively bridges user intent with editing model capabilities. X-Planner employs chain-of-thought reasoning to systematically decompose complex instructions into simpler, clear sub-instructions. For each sub-instruction, X-Planner automatically generates precise edit types and segmentation masks, eliminating manual intervention and ensuring localized, identity-preserving edits. Additionally, we propose a novel automated pipeline for generating large-scale data to train X-Planner which achieves state-of-the-art results on both existing benchmarks and our newly introduced complex editing benchmark.

We study the problem of planning under model uncertainty in an online meta-reinforcement learning (RL) setting where an agent is presented with a sequence of related tasks with limited interactions per task. The agent can use its experience in each task and across tasks to estimate both the transition model and the distribution over tasks. We propose an algorithm to meta-learn the underlying structure across tasks, utilize it to plan in each task, and upper-bound the regret of the planning loss. Our bound suggests that the average regret over tasks decreases as the number of tasks increases and as the tasks are more similar. In the classical single-task setting, it is known that the planning horizon should depend on the estimated model's accuracy, that is, on the number of samples within task. We generalize this finding to meta-RL and study this dependence of planning horizons on the number of tasks. Based on our theoretical findings, we derive heuristics for selecting slowly increasing discount factors, and we validate its significance empirically.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and its variants have markedly advanced the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet their monolithic and auto-regressive architecture inherently conflates high-level strategic planning with low-level step-by-step execution, leading to computational inefficiency, limited exploration of reasoning paths, and reduced interpretability. To overcome these issues, we propose the Explore-Execute Chain (E^2C), a structured reasoning framework that decouples reasoning into two distinct phases: an exploratory phase that stochastically generates succinct high-level plans, followed by an execution phase that deterministically carries out the chosen plan. Our approach incorporates a two-stage training methodology, which combines Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) - augmented by a novel data generation algorithm enforcing strict plan adherence - with a subsequent Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage that capitalizes on the informativeness of exploration and reinforces the determinism of execution. This decomposition enables an efficient test-time scaling strategy: on AIME'2024, E^2C Test Time Scaling reaches 58.1% accuracy using <10% of the decoding tokens required by comparable methods (e.g., Forest-of-Thought), sharply cutting self-consistency overhead. For cross-domain adaptation, our Exploration-Focused SFT (EF-SFT) fine-tunes with only 3.5% of the tokens used by standard SFT yet yields up to 14.5% higher accuracy than standard SFT on medical benchmarks, delivering state-of-the-art performance, strong generalization, and greater interpretability by separating planning from execution. The code and pre-trained models for the project are available at: https://github.com/yks23/Explore-Execute-Chain.git

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across diverse tasks, yet their ability to perform structured symbolic planning remains limited, particularly in domains requiring formal representations like the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). In this paper, we present a novel instruction tuning framework, PDDL-Instruct, designed to enhance LLMs' symbolic planning capabilities through logical chain-of-thought reasoning. Our approach focuses on teaching models to rigorously reason about action applicability, state transitions, and plan validity using explicit logical inference steps. By developing instruction prompts that guide models through the precise logical reasoning required to determine when actions can be applied in a given state, we enable LLMs to self-correct their planning processes through structured reflection. The framework systematically builds verification skills by decomposing the planning process into explicit reasoning chains about precondition satisfaction, effect application, and invariant preservation. Experimental results on multiple planning domains show that our chain-of-thought reasoning based instruction-tuned models are significantly better at planning, achieving planning accuracy of up to 94% on standard benchmarks, representing a 66% absolute improvement over baseline models. This work bridges the gap between the general reasoning capabilities of LLMs and the logical precision required for automated planning, offering a promising direction for developing better AI planning systems.

Clinical dialogue represents a complex duality requiring both the empathetic fluency of natural conversation and the rigorous precision of evidence-based medicine. While Large Language Models possess unprecedented linguistic capabilities, their architectural reliance on reactive and stateless processing often favors probabilistic plausibility over factual veracity. This structural limitation has catalyzed a paradigm shift in medical AI from generative text prediction to agentic autonomy, where the model functions as a central reasoning engine capable of deliberate planning and persistent memory. Moving beyond existing reviews that primarily catalog downstream applications, this survey provides a first-principles analysis of the cognitive architecture underpinning this shift. We introduce a novel taxonomy structured along the orthogonal axes of knowledge source and agency objective to delineate the provenance of clinical knowledge against the system's operational scope. This framework facilitates a systematic analysis of the intrinsic trade-offs between creativity and reliability by categorizing methods into four archetypes: Latent Space Clinicians, Emergent Planners, Grounded Synthesizers, and Verifiable Workflow Automators. For each paradigm, we deconstruct the technical realization across the entire cognitive pipeline, encompassing strategic planning, memory management, action execution, collaboration, and evolution to reveal how distinct architectural choices balance the tension between autonomy and safety.

AI Agents can perform complex operations at great speed, but just like all the humans we have ever hired, their intelligence remains fallible. Miscommunications aren't noticed, systemic biases have no counter-action, and inner monologues are rarely written down. We did not come to fire them for their mistakes, but to hire them and provide a safe productive working environment. We posit that we can reuse a common corporate organizational structure: teams of independent AI agents with strict role boundaries can work with common goals, but opposing incentives. Multiple models serving as a team of rivals can catch and minimize errors within the final product at a small cost to the velocity of actions. In this paper we demonstrate that we can achieve reliability without acquiring perfect components, but through careful orchestration of imperfect ones. This paper describes the architecture of such a system in practice: specialized agent teams (planners, executors, critics, experts), organized into an organization with clear goals, coordinated through a remote code executor that keeps data transformations and tool invocations separate from reasoning models. Rather than agents directly calling tools and ingesting full responses, they write code that executes remotely; only relevant summaries return to agent context. By preventing raw data and tool outputs from contaminating context windows, the system maintains clean separation between perception (brains that plan and reason) and execution (hands that perform heavy data transformations and API calls). We demonstrate the approach achieves over 90% internal error interception prior to user exposure while maintaining acceptable latency tradeoffs. A survey from our traces shows that we only trade off cost and latency to achieve correctness and incrementally expand capabilities without impacting existing ones.

Multi-turn long-horizon planning is critical for foundation model agents, yet how to fundamentally improve it remains unclear. Existing models are trained on uncontrollable and opaque Internet data, making it difficult to identify how planning ability is acquired, shaped, and integrated. To address this challenge, we introduce a unified and controlled multi-turn environment that enables precise control. It allows systematically study long-horizon planning across three stages. (1) Planning ability acquisition during pre-training. We study data format, distribution, and quality. Explicit world model construction through CoT state transition modeling yields stronger long-horizon generalization. Atomic skills alone are insufficient for compositional generalization, whereas a litte long-horizon data works. Moreover, suboptimal trajectories severely impair performance because errors amplify over long horizons. (2) Planning ability shaping via GRPO and OPD post-training. Through mutual information, we distinguish general planning patterns from task-specific planning knowledge. For planning patterns, we identify three application regions of post-training: unnecessary, effective, and unsupported. OPD has a broader effective region than GRPO under low-quality and long-horizon settings, as it provides more consistent update directions. For planning knowledge, distilling unseen procedures from a teacher with different knowledge may impair student's prior world modeling without fully establishing new knowledge. (3) Planning ability integration through MOPD post-training. We show that multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MOPD) integrates capabilities by converging to shared planning-pattern across environments. Compatible patterns enable cross-environment generalization, partially shared patterns support continual learning, while completely conflicting patterns cause severe interference.

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) generate text via iterative denoising but consistently underperform on multi-step reasoning. We hypothesize this gap stems from a coordination problem: AR models build coherence token-by-token, while diffusion models must coordinate all positions simultaneously. We propose plan conditioning, a training-free method that prepends a short (~100-token) natural-language plan from an AR model to the diffusion model's prompt. The plan serves as a frozen scaffold -- globally visible context that every token position can attend to from the first denoising step. On GSM8K, plan conditioning improves LLaDA-8B-Instruct from 75.6% to 87.2% (+11.6 percentage points), matching a same-size AR model (LLaMA 3.1 8B, 87.7%) despite a 6.4pp weaker baseline. On HumanEval, the gain is +12.8pp (37.2% to 50.0%), showing plans generalize to code. The same plans improve LLaMA by only +5.7pp on GSM8K and +1.3pp on HumanEval -- diffusion models benefit 2-10x more, supporting the coordination-problem hypothesis. Across 5 random seeds, plan-conditioned GSM8K accuracy has zero standard deviation, making diffusion inference highly stable. Ablations reveal the model follows plan strategy (wrong-strategy plans cause -16.3pp) but is robust to plan values (perturbed numbers: -1.1pp), and that planner quality has a sharp threshold: smaller Llama-class plans hurt (-1.6 to -6.8pp) while frontier plans provide the full lift. Attention analysis confirms the mechanism: plan tokens receive 1.8x excess attention during early denoising, declining to uniform as completion tokens solidify. Plan conditioning costs ~$0.002 per problem and adds ~2s of latency.

Despite the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, they still struggle with tasks that require generating complex, structured outputs. In this study, we assess the capability of Current LLMs in generating complex structured data and propose a structure-aware fine-tuning approach as a solution to improve this ability. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we propose Struc-Bench, include five representative LLMs (i.e., GPT-NeoX 20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna) and evaluate them on our carefully constructed datasets spanning raw text, HTML, and LaTeX tables. Based on our analysis of current model performance, we identify specific common formatting errors and areas of potential improvement. To address complex formatting requirements, we utilize FormatCoT (Chain-of-Thought) to generate format instructions from target outputs. Our experiments show that our structure-aware fine-tuning method, when applied to LLaMA-7B, significantly improves adherence to natural language constraints, outperforming other evaluated LLMs. Based on these results, we present an ability map of model capabilities from six dimensions (i.e., coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination). This map highlights the weaknesses of LLMs in handling complex structured outputs and suggests promising directions for future work. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

Coding assistants are increasingly leveraged in game design, both generating code and making high-level plans. To what degree can these tools align with developer workflows, and what new modes of human-computer interaction can emerge from their use? We present DreamGarden, an AI system capable of assisting with the development of diverse game environments in Unreal Engine. At the core of our method is an LLM-driven planner, capable of breaking down a single, high-level prompt -- a dream, memory, or imagined scenario provided by a human user -- into a hierarchical action plan, which is then distributed across specialized submodules facilitating concrete implementation. This system is presented to the user as a garden of plans and actions, both growing independently and responding to user intervention via seed prompts, pruning, and feedback. Through a user study, we explore design implications of this system, charting courses for future work in semi-autonomous assistants and open-ended simulation design.

Recent studies have highlighted their proficiency in some simple tasks like writing and coding through various reasoning strategies. However, LLM agents still struggle with tasks that require comprehensive planning, a process that challenges current models and remains a critical research issue. In this study, we concentrate on travel planning, a Multi-Phases planning problem, that involves multiple interconnected stages, such as outlining, information gathering, and planning, often characterized by the need to manage various constraints and uncertainties. Existing reasoning approaches have struggled to effectively address this complex task. Our research aims to address this challenge by developing a human-like planning framework for LLM agents, i.e., guiding the LLM agent to simulate various steps that humans take when solving Multi-Phases problems. Specifically, we implement several strategies to enable LLM agents to generate a coherent outline for each travel query, mirroring human planning patterns. Additionally, we integrate Strategy Block and Knowledge Block into our framework: Strategy Block facilitates information collection, while Knowledge Block provides essential information for detailed planning. Through our extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the planning capabilities of LLM agents, enabling them to tackle the travel planning task with improved efficiency and effectiveness. Our experimental results showcase the exceptional performance of the proposed framework; when combined with GPT-4-Turbo, it attains 10times the performance gains in comparison to the baseline framework deployed on GPT-4-Turbo.

Instruction-tuned large language models produce helpful, structured responses, but how robust is this helpfulness under trivial constraints? We show that simple lexical constraints (banning a single punctuation character or common word) cause instruction-tuned LLMs to collapse their responses, losing 14--48\% of comprehensiveness across seven models spanning five families (7B--70B, open- and closed-weight). A blinded human evaluation with 10 STEM-trained evaluators confirms genuine content loss, with information criteria degrading 1.5--2.3times more than surface criteria, a finding corroborated by over 4,100 automated pairwise comparisons (77--100\% baseline preference) across three LLM judges from two model families. Diagnostic analysis identifies this as a planning failure: two-pass generation recovers 59--96\% of response length, and linear probes on prompt representations predict response length with R^2 = 0.51--0.94 before generation begins. The same probes yield negative R^2 on base models, confirming that instruction tuning introduces the representational structure underlying the collapse. Base models show no systematic degradation under identical constraints, demonstrating that instruction tuning couples task competence to narrow surface-form templates. The effect extends to realistic deployment constraints (preamble suppression, corporate tone guidelines, legal compliance hedging, accessibility requirements) causing comparable degradation (-22\% to -34\%), with suppressing the conversational opener alone (``Certainly!'') causing 40\% collapse on our most fragile model despite restricting only the opening tokens. We further show that standard independent LLM-as-judge evaluation detects only a 3.5\% quality drop where pairwise evaluation reveals 23\%, exposing a methodological blind spot in current evaluation practice.

The ability to plan a course of action that achieves a desired state of affairs has long been considered a core competence of intelligent agents and has been an integral part of AI research since its inception. With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been considerable interest in the question of whether or not they possess such planning abilities. PlanBench, an extensible benchmark we developed in 2022, soon after the release of GPT3, has remained an important tool for evaluating the planning abilities of LLMs. Despite the slew of new private and open source LLMs since GPT3, progress on this benchmark has been surprisingly slow. OpenAI claims that their recent o1 (Strawberry) model has been specifically constructed and trained to escape the normal limitations of autoregressive LLMs--making it a new kind of model: a Large Reasoning Model (LRM). Using this development as a catalyst, this paper takes a comprehensive look at how well current LLMs and new LRMs do on PlanBench. As we shall see, while o1's performance is a quantum improvement on the benchmark, outpacing the competition, it is still far from saturating it. This improvement also brings to the fore questions about accuracy, efficiency, and guarantees which must be considered before deploying such systems.

Language Model (LM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving tasks that require multiple interactions with the environment. However, they remain vulnerable in environments where a single error often leads to irrecoverable failure, particularly under strict feasibility constraints. We systematically analyze existing agent frameworks, identifying imperfect planning and stochastic execution as the primary causes. To address these challenges, we propose Tool-guided Adaptive Planning with constrained Execution (TAPE). TAPE enhances planning capability by aggregating multiple plans into a graph and employing an external solver to identify a feasible path. During execution, TAPE employs constrained decoding to reduce sampling noise, while adaptively re-planning whenever environmental feedback deviates from the intended state. Experiments across Sokoban, ALFWorld, MuSiQue, and GSM8K-Hard demonstrate that TAPE consistently outperforms existing frameworks, with particularly large gains on hard settings, improving success rates by 21.0 percentage points on hard settings on average, and by 20.0 percentage points for weaker base models on average. Code and data available at here.

Diffusion models have recently shown significant potential in solving decision-making problems, particularly in generating behavior plans -- also known as diffusion planning. While numerous studies have demonstrated the impressive performance of diffusion planning, the mechanisms behind the key components of a good diffusion planner remain unclear and the design choices are highly inconsistent in existing studies. In this work, we address this issue through systematic empirical experiments on diffusion planning in an offline reinforcement learning (RL) setting, providing practical insights into the essential components of diffusion planning. We trained and evaluated over 6,000 diffusion models, identifying the critical components such as guided sampling, network architecture, action generation and planning strategy. We revealed that some design choices opposite to the common practice in previous work in diffusion planning actually lead to better performance, e.g., unconditional sampling with selection can be better than guided sampling and Transformer outperforms U-Net as denoising network. Based on these insights, we suggest a simple yet strong diffusion planning baseline that achieves state-of-the-art results on standard offline RL benchmarks.

Structure reasoning is a fundamental capability of large language models (LLMs), enabling them to reason about structured commonsense and answer multi-hop questions. However, existing benchmarks for structure reasoning mainly focus on horizontal and coordinate structures (e.g. graphs), overlooking the hierarchical relationships within them. Hierarchical structure reasoning is crucial for human cognition, particularly in memory organization and problem-solving. It also plays a key role in various real-world tasks, such as information extraction and decision-making. To address this gap, we propose HiBench, the first framework spanning from initial structure generation to final proficiency assessment, designed to benchmark the hierarchical reasoning capabilities of LLMs systematically. HiBench encompasses six representative scenarios, covering both fundamental and practical aspects, and consists of 30 tasks with varying hierarchical complexity, totaling 39,519 queries. To evaluate LLMs comprehensively, we develop five capability dimensions that depict different facets of hierarchical structure understanding. Through extensive evaluation of 20 LLMs from 10 model families, we reveal key insights into their capabilities and limitations: 1) existing LLMs show proficiency in basic hierarchical reasoning tasks; 2) they still struggle with more complex structures and implicit hierarchical representations, especially in structural modification and textual reasoning. Based on these findings, we create a small yet well-designed instruction dataset, which enhances LLMs' performance on HiBench by an average of 88.84\% (Llama-3.1-8B) and 31.38\% (Qwen2.5-7B) across all tasks. The HiBench dataset and toolkit are available here, https://github.com/jzzzzh/HiBench, to encourage evaluation.

Planning is a fundamental property of human intelligence. Reasoning about asynchronous plans is challenging since it requires sequential and parallel planning to optimize time costs. Can large language models (LLMs) succeed at this task? Here, we present the first large-scale study investigating this question. We find that a representative set of closed and open-source LLMs, including GPT-4 and LLaMA-2, behave poorly when not supplied with illustrations about the task-solving process in our benchmark AsyncHow. We propose a novel technique called Plan Like a Graph (PLaG) that combines graphs with natural language prompts and achieves state-of-the-art results. We show that although PLaG can boost model performance, LLMs still suffer from drastic degradation when task complexity increases, highlighting the limits of utilizing LLMs for simulating digital devices. We see our study as an exciting step towards using LLMs as efficient autonomous agents. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/fangru-lin/graph-llm-asynchow-plan.

Existing tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) encounter significant challenges when processing complex queries. Current frameworks such as ReAct are prone to local optimization traps due to their reliance on incremental decision-making processes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Planner-centric Plan-Execute paradigm that fundamentally resolves local optimization bottlenecks through architectural innovation. Central to our approach is a novel Planner model that performs global Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) planning for complex queries, enabling optimized execution beyond conventional tool coordination. We also introduce ComplexTool-Plan, a large-scale benchmark dataset featuring complex queries that demand sophisticated multi-tool composition and coordination capabilities. Additionally, we develop a two-stage training methodology that integrates Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), systematically enhancing the Planner's tool selection accuracy and global planning awareness through structured DAG-based planning. When integrated with a capable executor, our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on the StableToolBench benchmark for complex user queries, demonstrating superior end-to-end execution capabilities and robust handling of intricate multi-tool workflows.

Spatial visualization is the mental ability to imagine, transform, and manipulate the spatial characteristics of objects and actions. This intelligence is a part of human cognition where actions and perception are connected on a mental level. To explore whether state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit this ability, we develop MentalBlackboard, an open-ended spatial visualization benchmark for Paper Folding and Hole Punching tests within two core tasks: prediction and planning. Our prediction experiments reveal that models struggle with applying symmetrical transformations, even when they predict the sequence of unfolding steps correctly. Also, rotations introduce a significant challenge to the physical situational awareness for models. The planning task reveals limitations of models in analyzing symmetrical relationships and in implementing the multi-stage symmetry process, with Claude Opus 4.1 achieving the highest planning score at an accuracy of 10\%. The top-performing model, o3, attains a peak performance of 71.6\% on the generalization task, which does not require spatial visualization but transfers spatial data; however, it achieves only 25\% accuracy on text-based prediction tasks.

RL post-training strategies are dataset-dependent and reveal a recurring empirical pattern: capacity parameters accumulate monotonically across stages, while regularization parameters predominantly oscillate in response to shifting training dynamics. This distinction matters because fixed schedules commit all parameters to fixed trajectories and therefore cannot express the non-stationary exploration-exploitation tradeoffs that regularization must track; the principle provides actionable design rules for multi-stage training. We discover this through LLMZero, a system where LLM agents search over training trajectories via tree search, diagnosing pathologies at each checkpoint and proposing coordinated multi-parameter transitions. Across 4 diverse GRPO tasks, LLMZero discovers strategies that improve over the base model by 9% to 140% relative and over grid search by 6% to 15% relative, consistently outperforming random search and the skill-based agent. The structural principle transfers across tasks, providing an explanation for why discovered strategies take qualitatively different forms yet share similar parameter dynamics.

Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring (1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and (2)composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view. We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes. Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows. To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation. The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene. Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL. This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at https://viewsuite.github.io.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements in enabling language agents to tackle simple tasks. However, applying them for complex, multi-step, long-horizon tasks remains a challenge. Recent work have found success by separating high-level planning from low-level execution, which enables the model to effectively balance high-level planning objectives and low-level execution details. However, generating accurate plans remains difficult since LLMs are not inherently trained for this task. To address this, we propose Plan-and-Act, a novel framework that incorporates explicit planning into LLM-based agents and introduces a scalable method to enhance plan generation through a novel synthetic data generation method. Plan-and-Act consists of a Planner model which generates structured, high-level plans to achieve user goals, and an Executor model that translates these plans into environment-specific actions. To train the Planner effectively, we introduce a synthetic data generation method that annotates ground-truth trajectories with feasible plans, augmented with diverse and extensive examples to enhance generalization. We evaluate Plan-and-Act using web navigation as a representative long-horizon planning environment, demonstrating a state-of the-art 54% success rate on the WebArena-Lite benchmark.

Scientific posters play a vital role in academic communication by presenting ideas through visual summaries. Analyzing reading order and parent-child relations of posters is essential for building structure-aware interfaces that facilitate clear and accurate understanding of research content. Despite their prevalence in academic communication, posters remain underexplored in structural analysis research, which has primarily focused on papers. To address this gap, we constructed SciPostLayoutTree, a dataset of approximately 8,000 posters annotated with reading order and parent-child relations. Compared to an existing structural analysis dataset, SciPostLayoutTree contains more instances of spatially challenging relations, including upward, horizontal, and long-distance relations. As a solution to these challenges, we develop Layout Tree Decoder, which incorporates visual features as well as bounding box features including position and category information. The model also uses beam search to predict relations while capturing sequence-level plausibility. Experimental results demonstrate that our model improves the prediction accuracy for spatially challenging relations and establishes a solid baseline for poster structure analysis. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/omron-sinicx/scipostlayouttree. The code is also publicly available at https://github.com/omron-sinicx/scipostlayouttree.

Motivated by the substantial achievements observed in Large Language Models (LLMs) in the field of natural language processing, recent research has commenced investigations into the application of LLMs for complex, long-horizon sequential task planning challenges in robotics. LLMs are advantageous in offering the potential to enhance the generalizability as task-agnostic planners and facilitate flexible interaction between human instructors and planning systems. However, task plans generated by LLMs often lack feasibility and correctness. To address this challenge, we introduce ISR-LLM, a novel framework that improves LLM-based planning through an iterative self-refinement process. The framework operates through three sequential steps: preprocessing, planning, and iterative self-refinement. During preprocessing, an LLM translator is employed to convert natural language input into a Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) formulation. In the planning phase, an LLM planner formulates an initial plan, which is then assessed and refined in the iterative self-refinement step by using a validator. We examine the performance of ISR-LLM across three distinct planning domains. The results show that ISR-LLM is able to achieve markedly higher success rates in task accomplishments compared to state-of-the-art LLM-based planners. Moreover, it also preserves the broad applicability and generalizability of working with natural language instructions.

Today's classical planners are powerful, but modeling input tasks in formats such as PDDL is tedious and error-prone. In contrast, planning with Large Language Models (LLMs) allows for almost any input text, but offers no guarantees on plan quality or even soundness. In an attempt to merge the best of these two approaches, some work has begun to use LLMs to automate parts of the PDDL creation process. However, these methods still require various degrees of expert input. We present NL2Plan, the first domain-agnostic offline LLM-driven planning system. NL2Plan uses an LLM to incrementally extract the necessary information from a short text prompt before creating a complete PDDL description of both the domain and the problem, which is finally solved by a classical planner. We evaluate NL2Plan on four planning domains and find that it solves 10 out of 15 tasks - a clear improvement over a plain chain-of-thought reasoning LLM approach, which only solves 2 tasks. Moreover, in two out of the five failure cases, instead of returning an invalid plan, NL2Plan reports that it failed to solve the task. In addition to using NL2Plan in end-to-end mode, users can inspect and correct all of its intermediate results, such as the PDDL representation, increasing explainability and making it an assistive tool for PDDL creation.

Direct prompt-based editing often fails on complex transformations because vague and subjective prompts often require nuanced understanding of what should be changed in the image. Our core intuition is that leveraging compositional image editing tools rather than direct prompting profits from structured agent-level planning with explicit reasoning, leading to better results. This structured planning framework enables efficient offline RL post-training on quality-scored trajectories to improve performance. We present a tool-based agentic RL post-training framework that addresses this through structured planning with chain-of-thought reasoning. Our key contributions include: (1) A tool-based agentic planning methodology that combines a compositional library of orthogonal primitive transformations, structured context representation, and explicit per-step reasoning to decompose complex styling into interpretable tool sequences. (2) A synthetic data generation pipeline producing three large-scale datasets (each sim10K trajectories) with reasoning chains, plans, and quality scores, as no existing datasets provide such supervision. Our datasets and code are publicly available at the HuggingFace repository. (3) Offline RL training methods for learning planners with reasoning as our core algorithmic contributions, which consistently improve over the Edit-Only baseline in visual quality and instruction following. (4) Comprehensive evaluation across 4B and 8B parameter Qwen3-VL models showing that our methods outperform other baselines in the majority of compositional tasks, validated by human evaluations.

How should an agent decide when and how to plan? A dominant approach builds agents as reactive policies with adaptive computation (e.g., chain-of-thought), trained end-to-end expecting planning to emerge implicitly. Without control over the presence, structure, or horizon of planning, these systems dramatically increase reasoning length, yielding inefficient token use without reliable accuracy gains. We argue efficient agentic reasoning benefits from decomposing decision-making into three systems: simulative reasoning (System II) grounding deliberation in future-state prediction via a world model; self-regulation (System III) deciding when and how deeply to plan via a learned configurator; and reactive execution (System I) handling fine-grained action. Simulative reasoning provides unified planning across diverse tasks without per-domain engineering, while self-regulation ensures the planner is invoked only when needed. To test this, we develop SR^2AM (Self-Regulated Simulative Reasoning Agentic LLM), realizing both as distinct stages within an LLM's chain-of-thought, with the LLM as world model. We explore two instantiations: recording decisions from a prompted multi-module system (v0.1) and reconstructing structured plans from traces of pretrained reasoning LLMs (v1.0), trained via supervised then reinforcement learning (RL). Across math, science, tabular analysis, and web information seeking, v0.1-8B and v1.0-30B achieve Pass@1 competitive with 120-355B and 685B-1T parameter systems respectively, while v1.0-30B uses 25.8-95.3% fewer reasoning tokens than comparable agentic LLMs. RL increases average planning horizon by 22.8% while planning frequency grows only 2.0%, showing it learns to plan further ahead rather than more often. More broadly, learned self-regulation instantiates a principle we expect to extend beyond planning to how agents govern their own learning and adaptation.

Planning records define restrictions over geographic areas, but their source documents often provide only indirect spatial evidence rather than machine-readable boundaries. We introduce Plan2Map, a 208-case multimodal benchmark for document-grounded geospatial boundary reconstruction from UK planning records. Given only a source planning document, systems must reconstruct a valid geospatial boundary from notice text, schedules, map plates, map labels, and boundary annotations; the reference GeoJSON is held out for scoring. We propose GeoPlanAgent, a document-grounded, geospatial-tool-in-the-loop system that decomposes the task into evidence extraction, localisation, map registration, boundary segmentation, projection, and verification. On Plan2Map, GeoPlanAgent achieves 0.736 mean IoU and 0.904 median IoU, with 67.8\% of predictions at or above 0.8 IoU, substantially outperforming direct VLM-to-GeoJSON baselines. Diagnostic analysis shows that direct VLM prediction remains unreliable, while remaining errors are concentrated in localisation and map registration, and supervised boundary segmentation substantially improves pixel-level mask quality. Plan2Map provides a concrete testbed for multimodal geospatial reconstruction from public planning records. Project page: https://odeb1.github.io/Plan2Map_Project_Page/.

Procedural planning aims to implement complex high-level goals by decomposition into sequential simpler low-level steps. Although procedural planning is a basic skill set for humans in daily life, it remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs) that lack a deep understanding of the cause-effect relations in procedures. Previous methods require manual exemplars to acquire procedural planning knowledge from LLMs in the zero-shot setting. However, such elicited pre-trained knowledge in LLMs induces spurious correlations between goals and steps, which impair the model generalization to unseen tasks. In contrast, this paper proposes a neuro-symbolic procedural PLANner (PLAN) that elicits procedural planning knowledge from the LLMs with commonsense-infused prompting. To mitigate spurious goal-step correlations, we use symbolic program executors on the latent procedural representations to formalize prompts from commonsense knowledge bases as a causal intervention toward the Structural Causal Model. Both automatic and human evaluations on WikiHow and RobotHow show the superiority of PLAN on procedural planning without further training or manual exemplars.

Large language models excel at function- and file-level code generation, yet generating complete repositories from scratch remains a fundamental challenge. This process demands coherent and reliable planning across proposal- and implementation-level stages, while natural language, due to its ambiguity and verbosity, is ill-suited for faithfully representing complex software structures. To address this, we introduce the Repository Planning Graph (RPG), a persistent representation that unifies proposal- and implementation-level planning by encoding capabilities, file structures, data flows, and functions in one graph. RPG replaces ambiguous natural language with an explicit blueprint, enabling long-horizon planning and scalable repository generation. Building on RPG, we develop ZeroRepo, a graph-driven framework for repository generation from scratch. It operates in three stages: proposal-level planning and implementation-level refinement to construct the graph, followed by graph-guided code generation with test validation. To evaluate this setting, we construct RepoCraft, a benchmark of six real-world projects with 1,052 tasks. On RepoCraft, ZeroRepo produces repositories averaging nearly 36K LOC, roughly 3.9times the strongest baseline (Claude Code) and about 64times other baselines. It attains 81.5% functional coverage and a 69.7% pass rate, exceeding Claude Code by 27.3 and 35.8 percentage points, respectively. Further analysis shows that RPG models complex dependencies, enables progressively more sophisticated planning through near-linear scaling, and enhances LLM understanding of repositories, thereby accelerating agent localization.

Most work interpreting reasoning models studies only a single chain-of-thought (CoT), yet these models define distributions over many possible CoTs. We argue that studying a single sample is inadequate for understanding causal influence and the underlying computation. Though fully specifying this distribution is intractable, it can be understood by sampling. We present case studies using resampling to investigate model decisions. First, when a model states a reason for its action, does that reason actually cause the action? In "agentic misalignment" scenarios, we resample specific sentences to measure their downstream effects. Self-preservation sentences have small causal impact, suggesting they do not meaningfully drive blackmail. Second, are artificial edits to CoT sufficient for steering reasoning? These are common in literature, yet take the model off-policy. Resampling and selecting a completion with the desired property is a principled on-policy alternative. We find off-policy interventions yield small and unstable effects compared to resampling in decision-making tasks. Third, how do we understand the effect of removing a reasoning step when the model may repeat it post-edit? We introduce a resilience metric that repeatedly resamples to prevent similar content from reappearing downstream. Critical planning statements resist removal but have large effects when eliminated. Fourth, since CoT is sometimes "unfaithful", can our methods teach us anything in these settings? Adapting causal mediation analysis, we find that hints that have a causal effect on the output without being explicitly mentioned exert a subtle and cumulative influence on the CoT that persists even if the hint is removed. Overall, studying distributions via resampling enables reliable causal analysis, clearer narratives of model reasoning, and principled CoT interventions.

Planning in textual environments have been shown to be a long-standing challenge even for current models. A recent, promising line of work uses LLMs to generate a formal representation of the environment that can be solved by a symbolic planner. However, existing methods rely on a fully-observed environment where all entity states are initially known, so a one-off representation can be constructed, leading to a complete plan. In contrast, we tackle partially-observed environments where there is initially no sufficient information to plan for the end-goal. We propose PDDLEGO that iteratively construct a planning representation that can lead to a partial plan for a given sub-goal. By accomplishing the sub-goal, more information is acquired to augment the representation, eventually achieving the end-goal. We show that plans produced by few-shot PDDLEGO are 43% more efficient than generating plans end-to-end on the Coin Collector simulation, with strong performance (98%) on the more complex Cooking World simulation where end-to-end LLMs fail to generate coherent plans (4%).

The functionality of Large Language Model (LLM) agents is primarily determined by two capabilities: action planning and answer summarization. The former, action planning, is the core capability that dictates an agent's performance. However, prevailing training paradigms employ end-to-end, multi-objective optimization that jointly trains both capabilities. This paradigm faces two critical challenges: imbalanced optimization objective allocation and scarcity of verifiable data, making it difficult to enhance the agent's planning capability. To address these challenges, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Tool-use Rewards (RLTR), a novel framework that decouples the training process to enable a focused, single-objective optimization of the planning module. Crucially, RLTR introduces a reward signal based on tool-use completeness to directly evaluate the quality of tool invocation sequences. This method offers a more direct and reliable training signal than assessing the final response content, thereby obviating the need for verifiable data. Our experiments demonstrate that RLTR achieves an 8%-12% improvement in planning performance compared to end-to-end baselines. Moreover, this enhanced planning capability, in turn, translates to a 5%-6% increase in the final response quality of the overall agent system.

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, but their effectiveness in planning remains underexplored. In this study, we evaluate the planning capabilities of OpenAI's o1 models across a variety of benchmark tasks, focusing on three key aspects: feasibility, optimality, and generalizability. Through empirical evaluations on constraint-heavy tasks (e.g., Barman, Tyreworld) and spatially complex environments (e.g., Termes, Floortile), we highlight o1-preview's strengths in self-evaluation and constraint-following, while also identifying bottlenecks in decision-making and memory management, particularly in tasks requiring robust spatial reasoning. Our results reveal that o1-preview outperforms GPT-4 in adhering to task constraints and managing state transitions in structured environments. However, the model often generates suboptimal solutions with redundant actions and struggles to generalize effectively in spatially complex tasks. This pilot study provides foundational insights into the planning limitations of LLMs, offering key directions for future research on improving memory management, decision-making, and generalization in LLM-based planning. Code available at https://github.com/VITA-Group/o1-planning.

Structured Complex Task Decomposition (SCTD) is the problem of breaking down a complex real-world task (such as planning a wedding) into a directed acyclic graph over individual steps that contribute to achieving the task, with edges specifying temporal dependencies between them. SCTD is an important component of assistive planning tools, and a challenge for commonsense reasoning systems. We probe how accurately SCTD can be done with the knowledge extracted from Large Language Models (LLMs). We introduce a high-quality human-annotated dataset for this problem and novel metrics to fairly assess performance of LLMs against several baselines. Our experiments reveal that LLMs are able to decompose complex tasks into individual steps effectively, with a relative improvement of 15% to 280% over the best baseline. We also propose a number of approaches to further improve their performance, with a relative improvement of 7% to 37% over the base model. However, we find that LLMs still struggle to predict pairwise temporal dependencies, which reveals a gap in their understanding of complex tasks.

In this paper, we study the content-aware layout generation problem, which aims to automatically generate layouts that are harmonious with a given background image. Existing methods usually deal with this task with a single-step reasoning framework. The lack of a feedback-based self-correction mechanism leads to their failure rates significantly increasing when faced with complex element layout planning. To address this challenge, we introduce SEGA, a novel Stepwise Evolution Paradigm for Content-Aware Layout Generation. Inspired by the systematic mode of human thinking, SEGA employs a hierarchical reasoning framework with a coarse-to-fine strategy: first, a coarse-level module roughly estimates the layout planning results; then, another refining module performs fine-level reasoning regarding the coarse planning results. Furthermore, we incorporate layout design principles as prior knowledge into the model to enhance its layout planning ability. Besides, we present GenPoster-100K that is a new large-scale poster dataset with rich meta-information annotation. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by achieving the state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmark datasets. Our project page is at: https://brucew91.github.io/SEGA.github.io/

We present ThinkProbe, a framework for structural analysis of LLM reasoning traces. ThinkProbe converts each trace into a Thought Graph a directed graph with cycles, 8 node types, and 6 edge types and derives a 19-metric five-dimensional cognitive profile (5D-CP: Breadth, Depth, Structure, Metacognitive, Efficiency) through a fully non-generative pipeline combining rule-based segmentation and discriminative semantic linking. Applied to 4{,}200 traces from 7 native reasoning models across 200 open-ended questions and 10 cognitive domains, ThinkProbe reveals that reasoning structure is a stable, model-level property: between-model variance exceeds between-domain variance by up to fourfold across four of five cognitive dimensions, with Structure showing genuine sensitivity to question domain, exposing qualitatively distinct cognitive profiles invisible to accuracy-based evaluation.

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have attempted to categorize CoTs using predefined strategy types, such approaches are constrained by human intuition and fail to capture the full diversity of model behaviors. In this work, we introduce the CoT Encyclopedia, a bottom-up framework for analyzing and steering model reasoning. Our method automatically extracts diverse reasoning criteria from model-generated CoTs, embeds them into a semantic space, clusters them into representative categories, and derives contrastive rubrics to interpret reasoning behavior. Human evaluations show that this framework produces more interpretable and comprehensive analyses than existing methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that this understanding enables performance gains: we can predict which strategy a model is likely to use and guide it toward more effective alternatives. Finally, we provide practical insights, such as that training data format (e.g., free-form vs. multiple-choice) has a far greater impact on reasoning behavior than data domain, underscoring the importance of format-aware model design.

Recent agent frameworks and inference-time algorithms often struggle with complex planning problems due to limitations in verifying generated plans or reasoning and varying complexity of instances within a single task. Many existing methods for these tasks either perform task-level verification without considering constraints or apply inference-time algorithms without adapting to instance-level complexity. To address these limitations, we propose PlanGEN, a model-agnostic and easily scalable agent framework with three key components: constraint, verification, and selection agents. Specifically, our approach proposes constraint-guided iterative verification to enhance performance of inference-time algorithms--Best of N, Tree-of-Thought, and REBASE. In PlanGEN framework, the selection agent optimizes algorithm choice based on instance complexity, ensuring better adaptability to complex planning problems. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over the strongest baseline across multiple benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results on NATURAL PLAN (sim8%uparrow), OlympiadBench (sim4%uparrow), DocFinQA (sim7%uparrow), and GPQA (sim1%uparrow). Our key finding highlights that constraint-guided iterative verification improves inference-time algorithms, and adaptive selection further boosts performance on complex planning and reasoning problems.

To make effective decisions in novel environments with long-horizon goals, it is crucial to engage in hierarchical reasoning across spatial and temporal scales. This entails planning abstract subgoal sequences, visually reasoning about the underlying plans, and executing actions in accordance with the devised plan through visual-motor control. We propose Compositional Foundation Models for Hierarchical Planning (HiP), a foundation model which leverages multiple expert foundation model trained on language, vision and action data individually jointly together to solve long-horizon tasks. We use a large language model to construct symbolic plans that are grounded in the environment through a large video diffusion model. Generated video plans are then grounded to visual-motor control, through an inverse dynamics model that infers actions from generated videos. To enable effective reasoning within this hierarchy, we enforce consistency between the models via iterative refinement. We illustrate the efficacy and adaptability of our approach in three different long-horizon table-top manipulation tasks.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models typically map visual observations and linguistic instructions directly to robotic control signals. This "black-box" mapping forces a single forward pass to simultaneously handle instruction interpretation, spatial grounding, and low-level control, often leading to poor spatial precision and limited robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose VP-VLA, a dual-system framework that decouples high-level reasoning and low-level execution via a structured visual prompting interface. Specifically, a "System 2 Planner" decomposes complex instructions into sub-tasks and identifies relevant target objects and goal locations. These spatial anchors are then overlaid directly onto visual observations as structured visual prompts, such as crosshairs and bounding boxes. Guided by these prompts and enhanced by a novel auxiliary visual grounding objective during training, a "System 1 Controller" reliably generates precise low-level execution motions. Experiments on the Robocasa-GR1-Tabletop benchmark and SimplerEnv simulation demonstrate that VP-VLA improves success rates by 5% and 8.3%, surpassing competitive baselines including QwenOFT and GR00T-N1.6.

Automated analysis for engineering structures offers considerable potential for boosting efficiency by minimizing repetitive tasks. Although AI-driven methods are increasingly common, no systematic framework yet leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic structural analysis. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework that integrates LLMs with structural analysis software. LLMs serve as the core engine: they parse structural descriptions from text and translate them into executable Python scripts. Moreover, the framework integrates the generative capabilities of LLMs with code-based finite element (FE) tools like OpenSeesPy. It employs domain-specific prompt design and in-context learning strategies to enhance the LLM's problem-solving capabilities and generative stability, enabling fully automated structural analysis from descriptive text to model outputs. In our experiments, we introduce a well-curated small-scale benchmark dataset of 20 structural analysis word problems (SAWPs) with ground-truth solutions and evaluate the performance of different LLMs within our framework in solving these SAWPs. The role of system instructions, crafted by structural engineers, is also investigated to understand their impact on LLM-driven structural analysis. Additionally, the generative stability of our framework is examined. Through multiple validation experiments on the benchmark, our results demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially increase the level of automation in solving SAWPs compared to traditional methods. Quantitatively, the framework, built on GPT-4o, achieved 100% accuracy, surpassing GPT-4 (85%), Gemini 1.5 Pro (80%), and Llama-3.3 (30%) on the test examples. Furthermore, integrating domain-specific instructions enhanced performance by 30% on problems with asymmetrical structural configurations.

Understanding the abilities of LLMs to reason about natural language plans, such as instructional text and recipes, is critical to reliably using them in decision-making systems. A fundamental aspect of plans is the temporal order in which their steps needs to be executed, which reflects the underlying causal dependencies between them. We introduce CaT-Bench, a benchmark of Step Order Prediction questions, which test whether a step must necessarily occur before or after another in cooking recipe plans. We use this to evaluate how well frontier LLMs understand causal and temporal dependencies. We find that SOTA LLMs are underwhelming (best zero-shot is only 0.59 in F1), and are biased towards predicting dependence more often, perhaps relying on temporal order of steps as a heuristic. While prompting for explanations and using few-shot examples improve performance, the best F1 result is only 0.73. Further, human evaluation of explanations along with answer correctness show that, on average, humans do not agree with model reasoning. Surprisingly, we also find that explaining after answering leads to better performance than normal chain-of-thought prompting, and LLM answers are not consistent across questions about the same step pairs. Overall, results show that LLMs' ability to detect dependence between steps has significant room for improvement.

This is the first work to look at the application of large language models (LLMs) for the purpose of model space edits in automated planning tasks. To set the stage for this union, we explore two different flavors of model space problems that have been studied in the AI planning literature and explore the effect of an LLM on those tasks. We empirically demonstrate how the performance of an LLM contrasts with combinatorial search (CS) -- an approach that has been traditionally used to solve model space tasks in planning, both with the LLM in the role of a standalone model space reasoner as well as in the role of a statistical signal in concert with the CS approach as part of a two-stage process. Our experiments show promising results suggesting further forays of LLMs into the exciting world of model space reasoning for planning tasks in the future.

LLM-as-a-Judge models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) sequences intended to capture the step-bystep reasoning process that underlies the final evaluation of a response. However, due to the lack of human annotated CoTs for evaluation, the required components and structure of effective reasoning traces remain understudied. Consequently, previous approaches often (1) constrain reasoning traces to hand-designed components, such as a list of criteria, reference answers, or verification questions and (2) structure them such that planning is intertwined with the reasoning for evaluation. In this work, we propose EvalPlanner, a preference optimization algorithm for Thinking-LLM-as-a-Judge that first generates an unconstrained evaluation plan, followed by its execution, and then the final judgment. In a self-training loop, EvalPlanner iteratively optimizes over synthetically constructed evaluation plans and executions, leading to better final verdicts. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art performance for generative reward models on RewardBench (with a score of 93.9), despite being trained on fewer amount of, and synthetically generated, preference pairs. Additional experiments on other benchmarks like RM-Bench, JudgeBench, and FollowBenchEval further highlight the utility of both planning and reasoning for building robust LLM-as-a-Judge reasoning models.

Agents, as user-centric tools, are increasingly deployed for human task delegation, assisting with a broad spectrum of requests by generating thoughts, engaging with user proxies, and producing action plans. However, agents based on large language models (LLMs) often face substantial planning latency due to two primary factors: the efficiency limitations of the underlying LLMs due to their large size and high demand, and the structural complexity of the agents due to the extensive generation of intermediate thoughts to produce the final output. Given that inefficiency in service provision can undermine the value of automation for users, this paper presents a human-centered efficient agent planning method -- Interactive Speculative Planning -- aiming at enhancing the efficiency of agent planning through both system design and human-AI interaction. Our approach advocates for the co-design of the agent system and user interface, underscoring the importance of an agent system that can fluidly manage user interactions and interruptions. By integrating human interruptions as a fundamental component of the system, we not only make it more user-centric but also expedite the entire process by leveraging human-in-the-loop interactions to provide accurate intermediate steps. Code and data will be released.

We introduce a novel approach to the executable semantic object rearrangement problem. In this challenge, a robot seeks to create an actionable plan that rearranges objects within a scene according to a pattern dictated by a natural language description. Unlike existing methods such as StructFormer and StructDiffusion, which tackle the issue in two steps by first generating poses and then leveraging a task planner for action plan formulation, our method concurrently addresses pose generation and action planning. We achieve this integration using a Language-Guided Monte-Carlo Tree Search (LGMCTS). Quantitative evaluations are provided on two simulation datasets, and complemented by qualitative tests with a real robot.

Recent work has considered whether large language models (LLMs) can function as planners: given a task, generate a plan. We investigate whether LLMs can serve as generalized planners: given a domain and training tasks, generate a program that efficiently produces plans for other tasks in the domain. In particular, we consider PDDL domains and use GPT-4 to synthesize Python programs. We also consider (1) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) summarization, where the LLM is prompted to summarize the domain and propose a strategy in words before synthesizing the program; and (2) automated debugging, where the program is validated with respect to the training tasks, and in case of errors, the LLM is re-prompted with four types of feedback. We evaluate this approach in seven PDDL domains and compare it to four ablations and four baselines. Overall, we find that GPT-4 is a surprisingly powerful generalized planner. We also conclude that automated debugging is very important, that CoT summarization has non-uniform impact, that GPT-4 is far superior to GPT-3.5, and that just two training tasks are often sufficient for strong generalization.

Despite the remarkable success of large language models (LLMs) on traditional natural language processing tasks, their planning ability remains a critical bottleneck in tackling complex multi-step reasoning tasks. Existing approaches mainly rely on prompting or task-specific fine-tuning, often suffering from poor robustness and cross-task generalization. To address the limitation, we introduce CodePlan, a scalable framework that empowers LLMs to generate and follow code-form plans -- pseudocode that outlines high-level, structured reasoning processes. By leveraging the structured and versatile nature of code, CodePlan effectively captures the rich semantics and control flows inherent to sophisticated reasoning tasks. Importantly, CodePlan allows automatic extraction of code-form plans from massive, wide-ranging text corpora without the need for curated, task-specific datasets. This enables it to scale up efficiently and improve LLM's reasoning capabilities across diverse scenarios. To train CodePlan, we construct a large-scale dataset of 2M examples that integrate code-form plans with standard prompt-response pairs from existing corpora. With minimal computation overhead during both training and inference, CodePlan achieves a 25.1\% relative improvement compared with directly generating responses, averaged across 13 challenging multi-step reasoning benchmarks, spanning mathematical reasoning, symbolic reasoning, instruction-following, multi-hop QA, and decision-making tasks. Further analysis reveals CodePlan's increasing performance gains on more complex reasoning tasks, as well as significant data efficiency thanks to its generalization ability.

Planning remains a core challenge for large language models (LLMs), particularly in domains that require coherent multi-step action sequences grounded in external constraints. We introduce SymPlanner, a novel framework that equips LLMs with structured planning capabilities by interfacing them with a symbolic environment that serves as an explicit world model. Rather than relying purely on natural language reasoning, SymPlanner grounds the planning process in a symbolic state space, where a policy model proposes actions and a symbolic environment deterministically executes and verifies their effects. To enhance exploration and improve robustness, we introduce Iterative Correction (IC), which refines previously proposed actions by leveraging feedback from the symbolic environment to eliminate invalid decisions and guide the model toward valid alternatives. Additionally, Contrastive Ranking (CR) enables fine-grained comparison of candidate plans by evaluating them jointly. Conceptually, SymPlanner operationalizes two cognitive faculties: (i) error monitoring and repair via externalized feedback (IC) and (ii) preference formation among alternatives via pairwise comparison (CR), advancing cognitively plausible, symbol-grounded planning aligned with the rich structure in intelligent systems. We evaluate SymPlanner on PlanBench, demonstrating that it produces more coherent, diverse, and verifiable plans than pure natural language baselines.

Fact-seeking question answering with large language models (LLMs) remains unreliable when answers depend on up-to-date or conflicting information. Although retrieval-augmented and tool-using LLMs reduce hallucinations, they often rely on implicit planning, leading to inefficient tool usage. We propose a modular framework that explicitly separates planning from factual retrieval and answer synthesis. A lightweight student planner is trained via a teacher-student framework to generate structured decompositions consisting of abstract reasoning steps and searchable fact requests. The supervision signals contain only planning traces and fact requests, without providing factual answers or retrieved evidence. At inference, the planner produces plans, while prompt-engineered modules perform retrieval and response synthesis. We evaluate the proposed framework on SEAL-0, an extremely challenging benchmark for search-augmented LLMs. Results show that supervised planning improves both accuracy and latency compared to monolithic reasoning models and prompt-based tool-augmented frameworks, demonstrating that explicitly learned planning structures are essential for reliable fact-seeking LLMs.

Vision language models (VLMs) are an exciting emerging class of language models (LMs) that have merged classic LM capabilities with those of image processing systems. However, the ways that these capabilities combine are not always intuitive and warrant direct investigation. One understudied capability in VLMs is visual spatial planning -- the ability to comprehend the spatial arrangements of objects and devise action plans to achieve desired outcomes in visual scenes. In our study, we introduce VSP, a benchmark that 1) evaluates the spatial planning capability in these models in general, and 2) breaks down the visual planning task into finer-grained sub-tasks, including perception and reasoning, and measure the LMs capabilities in these sub-tasks. Our evaluation shows that both open-source and private VLMs fail to generate effective plans for even simple spatial planning tasks. Evaluations on the fine-grained analytical tasks further reveal fundamental deficiencies in the models' visual perception and bottlenecks in reasoning abilities, explaining their worse performance in the general spatial planning tasks. Our work illuminates future directions for improving VLMs' abilities in spatial planning. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/UCSB-NLP-Chang/Visual-Spatial-Planning.

In the endeavor to make autonomous robots take actions, task planning is a major challenge that requires translating high-level task descriptions into long-horizon action sequences. Despite recent advances in language model agents, they remain prone to planning errors and limited in their ability to plan ahead. To address these limitations in robotic planning, we advocate a self-refining scheme that iteratively refines a draft plan until an equilibrium is reached. Remarkably, this process can be optimized end-to-end from an analytical perspective without the need to curate additional verifiers or reward models, allowing us to train self-refining planners in a simple supervised learning fashion. Meanwhile, a nested equilibrium sequence modeling procedure is devised for efficient closed-loop planning that incorporates useful feedback from the environment (or an internal world model). Our method is evaluated on the VirtualHome-Env benchmark, showing advanced performance with better scaling for inference computation. Code is available at https://github.com/Singularity0104/equilibrium-planner.

In this paper, we present and implement a multi-dimensional, modular framework for performing deep argument analysis (DeepA2) using current pre-trained language models (PTLMs). ArgumentAnalyst -- a T5 model (Raffel et al. 2020) set up and trained within DeepA2 -- reconstructs argumentative texts, which advance an informal argumentation, as valid arguments: It inserts, e.g., missing premises and conclusions, formalizes inferences, and coherently links the logical reconstruction to the source text. We create a synthetic corpus for deep argument analysis, and evaluate ArgumentAnalyst on this new dataset as well as on existing data, specifically EntailmentBank (Dalvi et al. 2021). Our empirical findings vindicate the overall framework and highlight the advantages of a modular design, in particular its ability to emulate established heuristics (such as hermeneutic cycles), to explore the model's uncertainty, to cope with the plurality of correct solutions (underdetermination), and to exploit higher-order evidence.

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly tasked with complex real-world analysis (e.g., in financial forecasting, scientific discovery), yet their reasoning suffers from stochastic instability and lacks a verifiable, compositional structure. To address this, we introduce Analytica, a novel agent architecture built on the principle of Soft Propositional Reasoning (SPR). SPR reframes complex analysis as a structured process of estimating the soft truth values of different outcome propositions, allowing us to formally model and minimize the estimation error in terms of its bias and variance. Analytica operationalizes this through a parallel, divide-and-conquer framework that systematically reduces both sources of error. To reduce bias, problems are first decomposed into a tree of subpropositions, and tool-equipped LLM grounder agents are employed, including a novel Jupyter Notebook agent for data-driven analysis, that help to validate and score facts. To reduce variance, Analytica recursively synthesizes these grounded leaves using robust linear models that average out stochastic noise with superior efficiency, scalability, and enable interactive "what-if" scenario analysis. Our theoretical and empirical results on economic, financial, and political forecasting tasks show that Analytica improves 15.84% accuracy on average over diverse base models, achieving 71.06% accuracy with the lowest variance of 6.02% when working with a Deep Research grounder. Our Jupyter Notebook grounder shows strong cost-effectiveness that achieves a close 70.11% accuracy with 90.35% less cost and 52.85% less time. Analytica also exhibits highly noise-resilient and stable performance growth as the analysis depth increases, with a near-linear time complexity, as well as good adaptivity to open-weight LLMs and scientific domains.

Optimization plays a vital role in scientific research and practical applications. However, formulating a concrete optimization problem described in natural language into a mathematical form and selecting a suitable solver to solve the problem requires substantial domain expertise. We introduce OptimAI, a framework for solving Optimization problems described in natural language by leveraging LLM-powered AI agents, and achieve superior performance over current state-of-the-art methods. Our framework is built upon the following key roles: (1) a formulator that translates natural language problem descriptions into precise mathematical formulations; (2) a planner that constructs a high-level solution strategy prior to execution; and (3) a coder and a code critic capable of interacting with the environment and reflecting on outcomes to refine future actions. Ablation studies confirm that all roles are essential; removing the planner or code critic results in 5.8times and 3.1times drops in productivity, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce UCB-based debug scheduling to dynamically switch between alternative plans, yielding an additional 3.3times productivity gain. Our design emphasizes multi-agent collaboration, and our experiments confirm that combining diverse models leads to performance gains. Our approach attains 88.1% accuracy on the NLP4LP dataset and 82.3% on the Optibench dataset, reducing error rates by 58% and 52%, respectively, over prior best results.

This document serves as an overview of the different mechanisms and areas of governance in the BigCode project. It aims to support transparency by providing relevant information about choices that were made during the project to the broader public, and to serve as an example of intentional governance of an open research project that future endeavors can leverage to shape their own approach. The first section, Project Structure, covers the project organization, its stated goals and values, its internal decision processes, and its funding and resources. The second section, Data and Model Governance, covers decisions relating to the questions of data subject consent, privacy, and model release.

When reading a document, glancing at the spatial layout of a document is an initial step to understand it roughly. Traditional document layout analysis (DLA) methods, however, offer only a superficial parsing of documents, focusing on basic instance detection and often failing to capture the nuanced spatial and logical relations between instances. These limitations hinder DLA-based models from achieving a gradually deeper comprehension akin to human reading. In this work, we propose a novel graph-based Document Structure Analysis (gDSA) task. This task requires that model not only detects document elements but also generates spatial and logical relations in form of a graph structure, allowing to understand documents in a holistic and intuitive manner. For this new task, we construct a relation graph-based document structure analysis dataset (GraphDoc) with 80K document images and 4.13M relation annotations, enabling training models to complete multiple tasks like reading order, hierarchical structures analysis, and complex inter-element relation inference. Furthermore, a document relation graph generator (DRGG) is proposed to address the gDSA task, which achieves performance with 57.6% at mAP_g@0.5 for a strong benchmark baseline on this novel task and dataset. We hope this graphical representation of document structure can mark an innovative advancement in document structure analysis and understanding. The new dataset and code will be made publicly available at https://yufanchen96.github.io/projects/GraphDoc.

Strategic planning is critical for multi-step reasoning, yet compact Large Language Models (LLMs) often lack the capacity to formulate global strategies, leading to error propagation in long-horizon tasks. Our analysis reveals that LLMs possess latent reasoning capabilities that can be unlocked when conditioned on explicit plans from a teacher model; however, runtime reliance on external guidance is often impractical due to latency and availability constraints. To bridge this gap, we propose PILOT (Planning via Internalized Latent Optimization Trajectories), a non-invasive framework designed to internalize the strategic oversight of large models into intrinsic Latent Guidance. Instead of altering backbone weights, PILOT employs a lightweight Hyper-Network to synthesize a query-conditioned Latent Guidance vector. This vector acts as an internal steering mechanism, guiding the model's representations toward optimal reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that PILOT effectively stabilizes reasoning trajectories, consistently outperforming strong baselines (e.g., +8.9% on MATH500) with negligible inference latency.

Existing methods usually leverage a fixed strategy, such as natural language reasoning, code-augmented reasoning, tool-integrated reasoning, or ensemble-based reasoning, to guide Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform mathematical reasoning. Our analysis reveals that the single strategy cannot adapt to problem-specific requirements and thus overlooks the trade-off between effectiveness and efficiency. To address these issues, we propose Planning and Routing through Instance-Specific Modeling (PRISM), a novel framework that decouples mathematical reasoning into two stages: strategy planning and targeted execution. Specifically, we first curate a multi-strategy preference dataset, which we call MathStrat, capturing correctness, process quality, and computational efficiency for each problem--strategy pair. Then, we train a lightweight Strategy Adapter based on the dataset to obtain confidence distributions over the mentioned four reasoning strategies. At inference time, an adaptive routing policy dynamically tailors the reasoning approach based on predictor confidence. It directs the model to use single-strategy execution for high-confidence predictions, dual-strategy verification for competitive scenarios, or comprehensive multi-strategy exploration for uncertain cases. Extensive experiments across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that PRISM consistently outperforms individual strategies and ensemble baselines, achieving improvements ranging from 0.9% to 7.6% across different base models. The adaptive routing approach shows particularly strong benefits for mathematical reasoning tasks across diverse model architectures. Our code is released at https://github.com/reml-group/PRISM.

Conformant planning is the problem of finding a sequence of actions for achieving a goal in the presence of uncertainty in the initial state or action effects. The problem has been approached as a path-finding problem in belief space where good belief representations and heuristics are critical for scaling up. In this work, a different formulation is introduced for conformant problems with deterministic actions where they are automatically converted into classical ones and solved by an off-the-shelf classical planner. The translation maps literals L and sets of assumptions t about the initial situation, into new literals KL/t that represent that L must be true if t is initially true. We lay out a general translation scheme that is sound and establish the conditions under which the translation is also complete. We show that the complexity of the complete translation is exponential in a parameter of the problem called the conformant width, which for most benchmarks is bounded. The planner based on this translation exhibits good performance in comparison with existing planners, and is the basis for T0, the best performing planner in the Conformant Track of the 2006 International Planning Competition.