Can LLM-based models do model-based planning?

post by jylin04 · 2025-04-16T12:38:00.793Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

This is a link post for https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eYkXycZEu93KOdwh6sOm0hHXr-yZ61lRivWtL5yohRc/edit?usp=sharing

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I recently spent a few months thinking about whether LLM-based models can do model-based planning, and wrote a ~40-page report on it: "Report on LLMs and model-based planning".  The doc is a bit rough around the edges still - most notably, the concepts of "efficient planning" and "sufficiently convoluted" tasks in section 1 are incompletely defined - but I thought I would share it in the current form, in case others could find the framework or early conclusions useful.

The summary is as follows: 

In this report, I investigate the question of whether current LLM-based models have the cognitive capability of model-based planning (MBP). 

As motivation, model-based planning is a frequently mentioned crux in the ongoing debate about whether LLM-based models are on track to scale to AGI.  However, the debate is frequently underspecified, with different people taking e.g. “world-model” to mean different things. In this report, l first operationalize model-based planning in a way that in principle can be compared against information-processing patterns in trained LLMs, and explain why I think the operationalization may be necessary for AIs to achieve certain consequential tasks in the real world. I then explore whether current LLM-based models can do it, based mainly on their performance on related benchmarks.

My main findings are that

• Whether or not LLM-based models can do model-based planning may be bottlenecked by the complexity of the states required by the world-model: in particular whether or not they can be compressed into a compact representation in token form.
   
• Current “pure LLMs” through GPT-4 probably cannot do model-based planning as defined here for a nontrivial number of planning steps, over world-models with even very simple states, based on their performance on existing benchmarks. 
   
• Current reasoning models through o1 probably cannot do model-based planning as defined here for a nontrivial number of planning steps, over world-models with relatively simple states, based on their preliminary performance on existing benchmarks. 
   

• Existing benchmarks may imperfectly track model-based planning under this operationalization, and I suggest an idea for a new benchmark to fill in the gaps.

   

• Looking ahead, I think LLM-based architectures at scale could plausibly support model-based planning inefficiently, with one potential bottleneck being a potential need to encode intermediate states in the chain of thought. The main open questions are whether they could support efficient forms of model-based planning, and to what extent non-token state representations and efficient planning algorithms are needed to achieve consequential tasks in the real world.

This report is organized as follows. 

In section 1, I define and motivate the notion of model-based planning that I’ll use in the report.

In section 2, I review the LLM-based architectures that I’ll consider.

In section 3, I review the strategies with which we can try to get insight into whether current models and/or their architectures at scale can do model-based planning.

In section 4, I discuss whether current LLM-based models can do model-based planning over world-models with relatively simple states, based mostly on collecting results from existing benchmarks.

In section 5, I discuss ideas for future work.

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