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 finetuning, 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.
@article{arxiv.2505.13126,
title = {Iterative Formalization and Planning in Partially Observable Environments},
author = {Liancheng Gong and Wang Zhu and Jesse Thomason and Li Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13126},
year = {2026}
}