NATURAL PLAN: Benchmarking LLMs on Natural Language Planning
Authors: name: Huaixiu Steven Zheng; name: Swaroop Mishra; name: Hugh Zhang; name: Xinyun Chen; name: Minmin Chen; name: Azade Nova; name: Le Hou; name: Heng-Tze Cheng; name: Quoc V. Le; name: Ed H. Chi; name: Denny Zhou
Published: 2024-06-06 21:27:35

Abstract: We introduce NATURAL PLAN, a realistic planning benchmark in natural language
containing 3 key tasks: Trip Planning, Meeting Planning, and Calendar
Scheduling. We focus our evaluation on the planning capabilities of LLMs with
full information on the task, by providing outputs from tools such as Google
Flights, Google Maps, and Google Calendar as contexts to the models. This
eliminates the need for a tool-use environment for evaluating LLMs on Planning.
We observe that NATURAL PLAN is a challenging benchmark for state of the art
models. For example, in Trip Planning, GPT-4 and Gemini 1.5 Pro could only
achieve 31.1% and 34.8% solve rate respectively. We find that model performance
drops drastically as the complexity of the problem increases: all models
perform below 5% when there are 10 cities, highlighting a significant gap in
planning in natural language for SoTA LLMs. We also conduct extensive ablation
studies on NATURAL PLAN to further shed light on the (in)effectiveness of
approaches such as self-correction, few-shot generalization, and in-context
planning with long-contexts on improving LLM planning.