English

Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents

Machine Learning 2022-03-09 v2 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Robotics

Abstract

Can world knowledge learned by large language models (LLMs) be used to act in interactive environments? In this paper, we investigate the possibility of grounding high-level tasks, expressed in natural language (e.g. "make breakfast"), to a chosen set of actionable steps (e.g. "open fridge"). While prior work focused on learning from explicit step-by-step examples of how to act, we surprisingly find that if pre-trained LMs are large enough and prompted appropriately, they can effectively decompose high-level tasks into mid-level plans without any further training. However, the plans produced naively by LLMs often cannot map precisely to admissible actions. We propose a procedure that conditions on existing demonstrations and semantically translates the plans to admissible actions. Our evaluation in the recent VirtualHome environment shows that the resulting method substantially improves executability over the LLM baseline. The conducted human evaluation reveals a trade-off between executability and correctness but shows a promising sign towards extracting actionable knowledge from language models. Website at https://huangwl18.github.io/language-planner

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.07207,
  title  = {Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents},
  author = {Wenlong Huang and Pieter Abbeel and Deepak Pathak and Igor Mordatch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.07207},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

Project website at https://huangwl18.github.io/language-planner

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:54:18.596Z