Generating Symbolic World Models via Test-time Scaling of Large Language
  Models
Authors: name: Zhouliang Yu; name: Yuhuan Yuan; name: Tim Z. Xiao; name: Fuxiang Frank Xia; name: Jie Fu; name: Ge Zhang; name: Ge Lin; name: Weiyang Liu
Published: 2025-02-07 07:52:25

Abstract: Solving complex planning problems requires Large Language Models (LLMs) to
explicitly model the state transition to avoid rule violations, comply with
constraints, and ensure optimality-a task hindered by the inherent ambiguity of
natural language. To overcome such ambiguity, Planning Domain Definition
Language (PDDL) is leveraged as a planning abstraction that enables precise and
formal state descriptions. With PDDL, we can generate a symbolic world model
where classic searching algorithms, such as A*, can be seamlessly applied to
find optimal plans. However, directly generating PDDL domains with current LLMs
remains an open challenge due to the lack of PDDL training data. To address
this challenge, we propose to scale up the test-time computation of LLMs to
enhance their PDDL reasoning capabilities, thereby enabling the generation of
high-quality PDDL domains. Specifically, we introduce a simple yet effective
algorithm, which first employs a Best-of-N sampling approach to improve the
quality of the initial solution and then refines the solution in a fine-grained
manner with verbalized machine learning. Our method outperforms o1-mini by a
considerable margin in the generation of PDDL domain, achieving over 50%
success rate on two tasks (i.e., generating PDDL domains from natural language
description or PDDL problems). This is done without requiring additional
training. By taking advantage of PDDL as state abstraction, our method is able
to outperform current state-of-the-art methods on almost all competition-level
planning tasks.