LLM Agent Planning

LLM: Large Language Model

Overview

LLM agent planning studies how language models can turn instructions into sequences of actions that achieve goals in tools, software, websites, and physical or simulated environments. Common approaches include ReAct-style plan-and-act loops, hierarchical subgoals and skill graphs, symbolic planners such as PDDL, search methods such as tree search, and world models that predict action outcomes; reinforcement learning and trajectory feedback are also used to improve these systems. Evaluations span web and GUI navigation, coding, household tasks, games, and tool-use benchmarks, increasingly testing long horizons, changing conditions, tool failures, and resource costs. A central challenge is that a plausible plan does not guarantee faithful or safe execution: agents must track state, ground tool arguments, verify results, and recover when assumptions or plans fail.

Latest papers

226 papers38 papers in the last four weeks, up 100% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

Feb 23, 2026

TAPE: Tool-Guided Adaptive Planning and Constrained Execution in Language Model Agents

Language Model (LM) agents have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving tasks that require multiple interactions with the environment. However, they remain vulnerable in environments where a single error often leads to irrecoverable failure, particularly under strict feasibility constraints. We systematically analyze existing agent frameworks, identifying imperfect planning and stochastic execution as the primary causes. To address these challenges, we propose Tool-guided Adaptive Planning with constrained Execution (TAPE). TAPE enhances planning capability by aggregating multiple plans into a graph and employing an external solver to identify a feasible path. During execution, TAPE employs constrained decoding to reduce sampling noise, while adaptively re-planning whenever environmental feedback deviates from the intended state. Experiments across Sokoban, ALFWorld, MuSiQue, and GSM8K-Hard demonstrate that TAPE consistently outperforms existing frameworks, with particularly large gains on hard settings, improving success rates by 21.0 percentage points on hard settings on average, and by 20.0 percentage points for weaker base models on average. Code and data available at here.
Feb 22, 2026

City Editing: Hierarchical Agentic Execution for Dependency-Aware Urban Geospatial Modification

Urban renewal requires incremental modifications to existing geospatial plans, yet manually updating complex layouts under spatial constraints is labor-intensive and error-prone. To tackle this, we propose CEAE, a hierarchical agentic framework that formulates urban renewal as machine-executable GeoJSON editing from natural-language instructions. CEAE decomposes instructions into hierarchical geometric intents, executing edits from coarse to fine while preserving spatial consistency through a self-reflective execution-validation loop. Experimental results show that CEAE outperforms baselines in execution validity, robustness, and geometric accuracy.
Feb 22, 2026

MagicAgent: Towards Generalized Agent Planning

The evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) from passive text processors to autonomous agents has established planning as a core component of modern intelligence. However, achieving generalized planning remains elusive, not only by the scarcity of high-quality interaction data but also by inherent conflicts across heterogeneous planning tasks. These challenges result in models that excel at isolated tasks yet struggle to generalize, while existing multi-task training attempts suffer from gradient interference. In this paper, we present MagicAgent, a series of foundation models specifically designed for generalized agent planning. We introduce a lightweight and scalable synthetic data framework that generates high-quality trajectories across diverse planning tasks, including hierarchical task decomposition, tool-augmented planning, multi-constraint scheduling, procedural logic orchestration, and long-horizon tool execution. To mitigate training conflicts, we propose a two-stage training paradigm comprising supervised fine-tuning followed by multi-objective reinforcement learning over both static datasets and dynamic environments. Empirical results show that MagicAgent-32B and MagicAgent-30B-A3B achieve superior performance across diverse open-source benchmarks (e.g., 75.1%75.1\% on Worfbench and 86.9%86.9\% on BFCL-v3), as well as strong results on our in-house MagicEval benchmarks, substantially outperforming existing sub-100B models and surpassing leading ultra-scale models, including GPT-5.2, Kimi-K2 and GLM-4.7.
Feb 18, 2026

Calibrate-Then-Act: Cost-Aware Exploration in LLM Agents

LLM agents are deployed in environments where they must interact to acquire information. In these scenarios, the agent must reason about inherent cost-uncertainty tradeoffs in how to act, such as when to stop exploring and commit to an answer. For instance, on a programming task, an agent might run the code it generates, or it might generate tests for that code snippet; the cost of writing and running a test is nonzero, but typically lower than the cost of running buggy code. In this work, we show that we can induce LLM agents to explicitly reason about balancing these cost-uncertainty tradeoffs, then act more optimally in their environments. We formalize multiple tasks, including retrieval-augmented QA and a file reading coding task, as sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty. Each problem has latent environment state that impacts the agent's performance. We introduce a framework called Calibrate-Then-Act (CTA), where we pass the agent an inferred prior about this environment state to enable it to act more optimally. This information qualitatively changes agent behavior, and adds environment sensitivity to the agent which is not learned via standard RL training. Our results on a synthetic task, QA, and file reading show that making cost-benefit tradeoffs explicit with CTA helps agents discover more optimal decision-making strategies.
Feb 17, 2026

World-Model-Augmented Web Agents with Action Correction

Web agents based on large language models have demonstrated promising capability in automating web tasks. However, current web agents struggle to reason out sensible actions due to the limitations of predicting environment changes, and might not possess comprehensive awareness of execution risks, prematurely performing risky actions that cause losses and lead to task failure. To address these challenges, we propose WAC, a web agent that integrates model collaboration, consequence simulation, and feedback-driven action refinement. To overcome the cognitive isolation of individual models, we introduce a multi-agent collaboration process that enables an action model to consult a world model as a web-environment expert for strategic guidance; the action model then grounds these suggestions into executable actions, leveraging prior knowledge of environmental state transition dynamics to enhance candidate action proposal. To achieve risk-aware resilient task execution, we introduce a two-stage deduction chain. A world model, specialized in environmental state transitions, simulates action outcomes, which a judge model then scrutinizes to trigger action corrective feedback when necessary. Experiments show that WAC achieves absolute gains of 1.8% on VisualWebArena and 1.3% on Online-Mind2Web.
Feb 16, 2026

Tool-Aware Planning in Contact Center AI: Evaluating LLMs through Lineage-Guided Query Decomposition

We present a domain-grounded framework and benchmark for tool-aware plan generation in contact centers, where answering a query for business insights, our target use case, requires decomposing it into executable steps over structured tools (Text2SQL (T2S)/Snowflake) and unstructured tools (RAG/transcripts) with explicit depends_on for parallelism. Our contributions are threefold: (i) a reference-based plan evaluation framework operating in two modes - a metric-wise evaluator spanning seven dimensions (e.g., tool-prompt alignment, query adherence) and a one-shot evaluator; (ii) a data curation methodology that iteratively refines plans via an evaluator->optimizer loop to produce high-quality plan lineages (ordered plan revisions) while reducing manual effort; and (iii) a large-scale study of 14 LLMs across sizes and families for their ability to decompose queries into step-by-step, executable, and tool-assigned plans, evaluated under prompts with and without lineage. Empirically, LLMs struggle on compound queries and on plans exceeding 4 steps (typically 5-15); the best total metric score reaches 84.8% (Claude-3-7-Sonnet), while the strongest one-shot match rate at the "A+" tier (Extremely Good, Very Good) is only 49.75% (o3-mini). Plan lineage yields mixed gains overall but benefits several top models and improves step executability for many. Our results highlight persistent gaps in tool-understanding, especially in tool-prompt alignment and tool-usage completeness, and show that shorter, simpler plans are markedly easier. The framework and findings provide a reproducible path for assessing and improving agentic planning with tools for answering data-analysis queries in contact-center settings.
Feb 3, 2026

ProAct: A Benchmark and Multimodal Framework for Structure-Aware Proactive Response

While passive agents merely follow instructions, proactive agents align with higher-level objectives, such as assistance and safety by continuously monitoring the environment to determine when and how to act. However, developing proactive agents is hindered by the lack of specialized resources. To address this, we introduce ProAct-75, a benchmark designed to train and evaluate proactive agents across diverse domains, including assistance, maintenance, and safety monitoring. Spanning 75 tasks, our dataset features 91,581 step-level annotations enriched with explicit task graphs. These graphs encode step dependencies and parallel execution possibilities, providing the structural grounding necessary for complex decision-making. Building on this benchmark, we propose ProAct-Helper, a reference baseline powered by a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that grounds decision-making in state detection, and leveraging task graphs to enable entropy-driven heuristic search for action selection, allowing agents to execute parallel threads independently rather than mirroring the human's next step. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProAct-Helper outperforms strong closed-source models, improving trigger detection mF1 by 6.21%, saving 0.25 more steps in online one-step decision, and increasing the rate of parallel actions by 15.58%.
Jan 20, 2026

Toward Efficient Agents: Memory, Tool learning, and Planning

Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in extending large language models into agentic systems. While the effectiveness of agents has continued to improve, efficiency, which is crucial for real-world deployment, has often been overlooked. This paper therefore investigates efficiency from three core components of agents: memory, tool learning, and planning, considering costs such as latency, tokens, steps, etc. Aimed at conducting comprehensive research addressing the efficiency of the agentic system itself, we review a broad range of recent approaches that differ in implementation yet frequently converge on shared high-level principles including but not limited to bounding context via compression and management, designing reinforcement learning rewards to minimize tool invocation, and employing controlled search mechanisms to enhance efficiency, which we discuss in detail. Accordingly, we characterize efficiency in two complementary ways: comparing effectiveness under a fixed cost budget, and comparing cost at a comparable level of effectiveness. This trade-off can also be viewed through the Pareto frontier between effectiveness and cost. From this perspective, we also examine efficiency oriented benchmarks by summarizing evaluation protocols for these components and consolidating commonly reported efficiency metrics from both benchmark and methodological studies. Moreover, we discuss the key challenges and future directions, with the goal of providing promising insights.
Jan 16, 2026

AstroAgentBench: Evaluating Agentic Planning on Space Mission Planning Tasks

Recent LLM-for-Space systems address mission planning, scheduling, operations support, simulator control, and autonomy, but their evaluations use different task contracts, control settings, simulators, and success criteria. We introduce AstroAgentBench, a seven-family benchmark for executable space mission planning in the domains of scheduling, observation planning, constellation design, and relay support. For each case, an agent submits a planning artifact that is checked by an external verifier for schema, timing, geometry, resources, and mission value. Results report validity and normalized scores, with comparisons to task-specific solver references. Across five LLM agent systems and 35 held-out cases, the strongest systems approach or exceed solver-reference scores on several families, while weaker systems often fail to produce high-value valid plans and even strong systems lose quality on geometric, product-level, or design-heavy tasks. Trace analyses separate two failure points: task-contract misformulation and weak solution construction. Successful runs instead calibrate agent-written implementations against verifier feedback and adapt search to case-specific structure. Ablations show that procedure injection and memory accumulation help selectively, when they supply the missing formulation, calibration, or search support.
Jan 13, 2026

Imagine-then-Plan: Agent Learning from Adaptive Lookahead with World Models

Recent advances in world models have shown promise for modeling future dynamics of environmental states, enabling agents to reason and act without accessing real environments. Current methods mainly perform single-step or fixed-horizon rollouts, leaving their potential for complex task planning under-exploited. We propose Imagine-then-Plan (ITP), a unified framework for agent learning via lookahead imagination, where an agent's policy model interacts with the learned world model, yielding multi-step ``imagined'' trajectories. Since the imagination horizon may vary by tasks and stages, we introduce a novel adaptive lookahead mechanism by trading off the ultimate goal and task progress. The resulting imagined trajectories provide rich signals about future consequences, such as achieved progress and potential conflicts, which are fused with current observations, formulating a partially observable and imaginable Markov decision process to guide policy learning. We instantiate ITP with both training-free and reinforcement-trained variants. Extensive experiments across representative agent benchmarks demonstrate that ITP significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Further analyses validate that our adaptive lookahead largely enhances agents' reasoning capability, providing valuable insights into addressing broader, complex tasks. Our code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/loyiv/ITP.
Nov 4, 2025

CostBench: Evaluating Multi-Turn Cost-Optimal Planning and Adaptation in Dynamic Environments for LLM Tool-Use Agents

Current evaluations of Large Language Model (LLM) agents primarily emphasize task completion, often overlooking resource efficiency and adaptability. This neglects a crucial capability: agents' ability to devise and adjust cost-optimal plans in response to changing environments. To bridge this gap, we introduce CostBench, a scalable, cost-centric benchmark designed to evaluate agents' economic reasoning and replanning abilities. Situated in the travel-planning domain, CostBench comprises tasks solvable via multiple sequences of atomic and composite tools with diverse, customizable costs. It also supports four types of dynamic blocking events, such as tool failures and cost changes, to simulate real-world unpredictability and necessitate agents to adapt in real time. Evaluating leading open-sourced and proprietary models on CostBench reveals a substantial gap in cost-aware planning: agents frequently fail to identify cost-optimal solutions in static settings, with even GPT-5 achieving less than 75% exact match rate on the hardest tasks, and performance further dropping by around 40% under dynamic conditions. By diagnosing these weaknesses, CostBench lays the groundwork for developing future agents that are both economically rational and robust.
Oct 24, 2025

CXRAgent: Director-Orchestrated Multi-Stage Reasoning for Chest X-Ray Interpretation

Chest X-ray (CXR) plays a pivotal role in clinical diagnosis, and a variety of task-specific and foundation models have been developed for automatic CXR interpretation. However, these models often struggle to adapt to new diagnostic tasks and complex reasoning scenarios. Recently, LLM-based agent models have emerged as a promising paradigm for CXR analysis, enhancing model's capability through tool coordination, multi-step reasoning, and team collaboration, etc. However, existing agents often rely on a single diagnostic pipeline and lack mechanisms for assessing tools' reliability, limiting their adaptability and credibility. To this end, we propose CXRAgent, a director-orchestrated, multi-stage agent for CXR interpretation, where a central director coordinates the following stages: (1) Tool Invocation: The agent strategically orchestrates a set of CXR-analysis tools, with outputs normalized and verified by the Evidence-driven Validator (EDV), which grounds diagnostic outputs with visual evidence to support reliable downstream diagnosis; (2) Diagnostic Planning: Guided by task requirements and intermediate findings, the agent formulates a targeted diagnostic plan. It then assembles an expert team accordingly, defining member roles and coordinating their interactions to enable adaptive and collaborative reasoning; (3) Collaborative Decision-making: The agent integrates insights from the expert team with accumulated contextual memories, synthesizing them into an evidence-backed diagnostic conclusion. Experiments on various CXR interpretation tasks show that CXRAgent delivers strong performance, providing visual evidence and generalizes well to clinical tasks of different complexity. Code and data are valuable at this link.
Oct 7, 2025

Agent+P: Guiding UI Agents via Symbolic Planning

Large Language Model (LLM)-based UI agents show great promise for UI automation but often hallucinate in long-horizon tasks due to their lack of understanding of the global UI transition structure. To address this, we introduce AGENT+P, a novel framework that leverages symbolic planning to guide LLM-based UI agents. Specifically, we model an app's UI transition structure as a UI Transition Graph (UTG), which allows us to reformulate the UI automation task as a pathfinding problem on the UTG. This further enables an off-the-shelf symbolic planner to generate a provably correct and optimal high-level plan, preventing the agent from redundant exploration and guiding the agent to achieve the automation goals. AGENT+P is designed as a plug-and-play framework to enhance existing UI agents. Evaluation on the AndroidWorld benchmark demonstrates that AGENT+P improves the success rates of state-of-the-art UI agents by up to 14.32% and reduces the action steps by 37.70%. Our code is available at: https://github.com/KiteFlyKid/agentp.
Sep 26, 2025

DeepTravel: An End-to-End Agentic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Autonomous Travel Planning Agents

Travel planning (TP) agent has recently worked as an emerging building block to interact with external tools/resources for travel itinerary generation, ensuring an enjoyable user experience. Despite its benefits, existing studies rely on hand-craft prompt and fixed agent workflow, hindering more flexible and autonomous TP agents. This paper proposes DeepTravel, an end-to-end agentic reinforcement learning framework for building an autonomous travel planning agent, capable of autonomously planning, executing tools, and reflecting on tool responses to explore, verify, and refine intermediate actions in multi-step reasoning. To achieve this, we first construct a robust travel sandbox by caching transportation, accommodation and POI data, facilitating TP agent training without being constrained by real-world APIs limitations (e.g., inconsistent outputs). Moreover, we develop a hierarchical reward modeling system, where a trajectory-level verifier first checks spatiotemporal feasibility and filters unsatisfied travel itinerary, and then the turn-level verifier further validate itinerary's detail consistency with tool responses, enabling efficient and precise reward service. Finally, we propose the reply-augmented reinforcement learning method that enables TP agent to periodically replay from a failure experience buffer, emerging notable agentic capacity. We deploy the trained TP agent in the DiDi Enterprise Solutions application. A three-month online test shows that it achieves 82% accuracy in travel itinerary generation. Comprehensive offline evaluations further demonstrate that DeepTravel enables small-sized LLMs (e.g., Qwen3-32B) to significantly outperform frontier LLMs (e.g., OpenAI o1/o3 and DeepSeek-R1) and existing TP agent frameworks.
Aug 29, 2025

COCORELI: Enforcing Execution Preconditions for Reliable Collaborative Instruction Following

Autonomous agents executing human instructions must operate reliably even when instructions are incomplete. While recent approaches improve detection of missing information, detection alone is insufficient: agents often proceed to execution even after recognizing underspecification, leading to incorrect or unsafe actions. We identify this failure as arising from a lack of coupling between detection and execution, and propose that reliable behavior requires enforcing missing information as a precondition for action. We instantiate this principle in Cocoreli, a modular architecture that represents task structure, tracks missing information, and blocks execution until required details are resolved through targeted clarification. In Cocoreli, detection and prevention are structurally coupled: detecting a missing parameter simultaneously blocks execution. We evaluate Cocoreli in a controlled construction environment isolating underspecification and sequential execution. Cocoreli blocks execution under unresolved specifications by construction, eliminating hallucinated actions. In contrast, chain-of-thought, prompt-chaining, and ReAct-style reasoning may still execute under incomplete specifications despite high detection rates. The same representation supports abstraction and reuse, and generalizes to API workflow tasks on ToolBench. These results show that reliable collaborative execution requires architectural enforcement, not just model capability
Jul 28, 2025

GenoMAS: Guided Multi-Agent Programming for Scientific Discovery from Genomic Data

Gene expression analysis holds the key to many biomedical discoveries, yet extracting insights from raw transcriptomic data remains challenging due to the complexity of multiple large, semi-structured files and the need for extensive domain expertise. Current approaches either rely on inflexible workflows that fail in edge cases or fully autonomous agents that lack the precision required for rigorous scientific inquiry. GenoMAS addresses this by presenting a team of LLM-based agents that integrates structured workflows with autonomous adaptability, orchestrating diverse specialized agents through typed message-passing protocols. At its core lies a guided-planning framework where programming agents decompose task guidelines into Action Units and dynamically choose to advance, revise, bypass, or backtrack, maintaining logical coherence while adapting to the idiosyncrasies of genomic data. On the GenoTEX benchmark, GenoMAS achieves 89.13% CSC for data preprocessing and 60.48% F1F_1 for identifying trait-associated genes, surpassing prior art by 10.61% and 16.85%. Beyond transcriptomics, it outperforms strong agent baselines on ScienceAgentBench and DiscoveryBench, two independent bioinformatics benchmarks. Qualitative analysis shows that GenoMAS identifies gene-phenotype associations that are biologically plausible and corroborated by the literature.