arXiv:2507.02253v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Progress in enhancing large language model (LLM) planning and reasoning capabilities is significantly hampered by the bottleneck of scalable, reliable data generation and evaluation. To overcome this, I introduce NL2FLOW, a fully automated system for parametrically generating planning problems – expressed in natural language, a structured intermediate representation, and formal PDDL – and rigorously evaluating the quality of generated plans. I demonstrate NL2FLOW’s capabilities by generating a dataset of 2296 problems in the automated workflow generation domain and evaluating multiple open-sourced, instruct-tuned LLMs. My results reveal that the highest performing models achieved 86% success in generating valid plans and 69% in generating optimal plans, specifically for problems with feasible solutions. Regression analysis shows that the influence of problem characteristics on plan generation is contingent on both model and prompt design. Notably, I observed that the highest success rate for translating natural language into a JSON representation of a plan was lower than the highest rate of generating a valid plan directly. This suggests that unnecessarily decomposing the reasoning task – introducing intermediate translation steps – may actually degrade performance, implying a benefit to models capable of reasoning directly from natural language to action. As I scale LLM reasoning to increasingly complex problems, the bottlenecks and sources of error within these systems will inevitably shift. Therefore, a dynamic understanding of these limitations – and the tools to systematically reveal them – will be crucial for unlocking the full potential of LLMs as intelligent problem solvers.
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Scaling LLM Planning: NL2FLOW for Parametric Problem Generation and Rigorous Evaluation
