Yi Li
Other people with similar names: Yi Li, Yi Li
Unverified author pages with similar names: Yi Li
2026
NL ⇒ Schedule: Evaluate Multitask Scheduling Capability of Large Language Models
Wenrui Liao | Weihong Du | Yi Li | Hongru Liang | Wenqiang Lei
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Wenrui Liao | Weihong Du | Yi Li | Hongru Liang | Wenqiang Lei
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Automated schedule generation for multitask from natural language descriptions has huge potential in modern industry. While classic methods bypass language complexities by using pre-formatted matrices, and recent LLM+solver approaches introduce new fragilities by relying on solver-specific code generation. This raises critical questions: Can large language models (LLMs) solve this NL ⇒ Schedule task end-to-end well(RQ1)? If the answer is "no", where do they fall short(RQ2)? And how can their capabilities be enhanced (RQ3)? To answer these questions, we introduce NL ⇒ Schedule, the first benchmark for this task, equipped with a dataset of 240 description-schedule pairs constructed from real-world materials and a rigorous evaluation suite. Our evaluation of nine state-of-the-art LLMs reveals the limitations of different LLMs in procedure grounding and the strengths of advanced LLMs in global planning via local analysis. To address these shortcomings, we propose Mans, a novel multi-agent framework. Extensive experiments show that Mans achieves more robust performance comparable to six state-of-the-art LLM+solver methods. We hope NL ⇒ Schedule and Mans will serve as a solid foundation for automatic scheduling.