Programming over Thinking: Efficient and Robust Multi-Constraint Planning

Despite their strong reasoning capabilities and extensive world knowledge, Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently generate plans that violate task constraints, undermining their reliability in real-world applications. This deficiency arises from a lack of systematic mechanisms to incorporate constraint information during the generation process. While existing approaches attempt to mitigate this by relying on external tools or task decomposition, they fail to enhance the model's intrinsic constraint awareness. To address this, we propose Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning (CARL), a novel RL framework designed to strengthen LLMs' intrinsic focus on constraints. CARL introduces a constraint-aware reward by comparing the model's output distributions under constrained and unconstrained inputs, encouraging constraint focus and penalizing neglect. Compatible with various RL frameworks and requiring no external solvers or top models, CARL enables scalable, end-to-end constraint-aware planning. Extensive experiments on BlocksWorld, TravelPlanner, and T-Eval demonstrate that CARL significantly outperforms standard Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT) baselines and state-of-the-art reasoning models, exhibiting a markedly increased focus on constraints.

Planning is a fundamental capability for large language models (LLMs) because such complex tasks require models to coordinate goals, constraints, resources, and long-term consequences into executable and verifiable solutions. Existing planning benchmarks, however, usually treat planning data as fixed collections of instances rather than controllable generation targets. This limits scenario coverage, ties difficulty to surface-level proxies rather than structural sources, and offers limited support for scalable generation, automatic verification, or planning-oriented training. We introduce PlanningBench, a framework for generating scalable, diverse, and verifiable planning data for both evaluation and training. PlanningBench starts from real planning scenarios and abstracts practical workflows into a structured taxonomy of more than 30 task types, subtasks, constraint families, and difficulty factors. Guided by this taxonomy, a constraint-driven synthesis pipeline instantiates self-contained planning problems with adaptive difficulty control, quality filtering, and instance-level verification checklists. This shifts planning data construction from fixed benchmark collection to controllable generation while preserving realistic task grounding. We use PlanningBench to evaluate open-source and closed-source frontier LLMs, and find that current models still struggle to produce complete solutions under coupled constraints. Beyond evaluation, reinforcement learning on verified PlanningBench data improves performance on unseen planning benchmarks and broader instruction-following tasks. Further analysis suggests that determinate or well-specified optimal solutions provide clearer reward signals and more stable training dynamics. Overall, PlanningBench provides a controllable source of planning data for diagnosing and improving generalizable planning abilities in LLMs.

Behavior sequences, composed of executable steps, serve as the operational foundation for multi-constraint planning problems such as travel planning. In such tasks, each planning step is not only constrained locally but also influenced by global constraints spanning multiple subtasks, leading to a tightly coupled and complex decision process. Existing travel planning methods typically rely on a single decision space that entangles all subtasks and constraints, failing to distinguish between locally acting constraints within a subtask and global constraints that span multiple subtasks. Consequently, the model is forced to jointly reason over local and global constraints at each decision step, increasing the reasoning burden and reducing planning efficiency. To address this problem, we propose the Behavior Forest method. Specifically, our approach structures the decision-making process into a forest of parallel behavior trees, where each behavior tree is responsible for a subtask. A global coordination mechanism is introduced to orchestrate the interactions among these trees, enabling modular and coherent travel planning. Within this framework, large language models are embedded as decision engines within behavior tree nodes, performing localized reasoning conditioned on task-specific constraints to generate candidate subplans and adapt decisions based on coordination feedback. The behavior trees, in turn, provide an explicit control structure that guides LLM generation. This design decouples complex tasks and constraints into manageable subspaces, enabling task-specific reasoning and reducing the cognitive load of LLM. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.67% on the TravelPlanner and by 11.82% on the ChinaTravel benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in increasing LLM performance for complex multi-constraint travel planning.