Chain-of-Symbol Prompting Elicits Planning in Large Langauge Models

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Main Authors: Hu, Hanxu, Lu, Hongyuan, Zhang, Huajian, Song, Yun-Ze, Lam, Wai, Zhang, Yue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Hu, Hanxu
Lu, Hongyuan
Zhang, Huajian
Song, Yun-Ze
Lam, Wai
Zhang, Yue
author_facet Hu, Hanxu
Lu, Hongyuan
Zhang, Huajian
Song, Yun-Ze
Lam, Wai
Zhang, Yue
contents In this paper, we take the initiative to investigate the performance of LLMs on complex planning tasks that require LLMs to understand a virtual spatial environment simulated via natural language and act correspondingly in text. We propose a benchmark named Natural Language Planning and Action (Natala) composed of a set of novel tasks: Brick World, NLVR-based Manipulations, and Natural Language Navigation. We found that current popular LLMs such as ChatGPT still lack abilities in complex planning. This arises a question -- do the LLMs have a good understanding of the environments described in natural language, or maybe other alternatives such as symbolic representations are neater and hence better to be understood by LLMs? To this end, we propose a novel method called CoS (Chain-of-Symbol Prompting) that represents the complex environments with condensed symbolic spatial representations during the chained intermediate thinking steps. CoS is easy to use and does not need additional training on LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that CoS clearly surpasses the performance of the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting in all three planning tasks with even fewer tokens used in the inputs compared with CoT on ChatGPT and InstructGPT. The performance gain is strong, by up to 60.8% accuracy (from 31.8% to 92.6%) on Brick World for ChatGPT. CoS also reduces the number of tokens in the prompt obviously, by up to 65.8% of the tokens (from 407 to 139) for the intermediate steps from demonstrations on Brick World. Code and data available at: https://github.com/hanxuhu/chain-of-symbol-planning
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_10276
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Chain-of-Symbol Prompting Elicits Planning in Large Langauge Models
Hu, Hanxu
Lu, Hongyuan
Zhang, Huajian
Song, Yun-Ze
Lam, Wai
Zhang, Yue
Computation and Language
In this paper, we take the initiative to investigate the performance of LLMs on complex planning tasks that require LLMs to understand a virtual spatial environment simulated via natural language and act correspondingly in text. We propose a benchmark named Natural Language Planning and Action (Natala) composed of a set of novel tasks: Brick World, NLVR-based Manipulations, and Natural Language Navigation. We found that current popular LLMs such as ChatGPT still lack abilities in complex planning. This arises a question -- do the LLMs have a good understanding of the environments described in natural language, or maybe other alternatives such as symbolic representations are neater and hence better to be understood by LLMs? To this end, we propose a novel method called CoS (Chain-of-Symbol Prompting) that represents the complex environments with condensed symbolic spatial representations during the chained intermediate thinking steps. CoS is easy to use and does not need additional training on LLMs. Extensive experiments indicate that CoS clearly surpasses the performance of the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting in all three planning tasks with even fewer tokens used in the inputs compared with CoT on ChatGPT and InstructGPT. The performance gain is strong, by up to 60.8% accuracy (from 31.8% to 92.6%) on Brick World for ChatGPT. CoS also reduces the number of tokens in the prompt obviously, by up to 65.8% of the tokens (from 407 to 139) for the intermediate steps from demonstrations on Brick World. Code and data available at: https://github.com/hanxuhu/chain-of-symbol-planning
title Chain-of-Symbol Prompting Elicits Planning in Large Langauge Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10276