Wang Bill Zhu


2026

Using LLMs not to predict plans but to formalize an environment into the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) has been shown to improve performance and control. While most existing methodology only applies to fully observable environments, we adapt to the more realistic and challenging partially observable environments without sufficient information to make a complete plan. We propose PDDLego+, a framework to iteratively formalize, plan, grow, and refine PDDL representations by decomposing the environment and the goal into fully observable episodes. Without fine-tuning, in-context exemplars, or trajectories, PDDLego+ improves planning success and exhibits robustness against problem complexity compared to end-to-end approaches. We also show that the domain knowledge captured after a successful trial can benefit future tasks.

2025

Symbolic planners can discover a sequence of actions from initial to goal states given expert-defined, domain-specific logical action semantics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can directly generate such sequences, but limitations in reasoning and state-tracking often result in plans that are insufficient or unexecutable. We propose Predicting Semantics of Actions with Language Models (PSALM), which automatically learns action semantics by leveraging the strengths of both symbolic planners and LLMs. PSALM repeatedly proposes and executes plans, using the LLM to partially generate plans and to infer domain-specific action semantics based on execution outcomes. PSALM maintains a belief over possible action semantics that is iteratively updated until a goal state is reached. Experiments on 7 environments show that when learning just from one goal, PSALM boosts plan success rate from 36.4% (on Claude-3.5) to 100%, and explores the environment more efficiently than prior work to infer ground truth domain action semantics.