NSP: A Neuro-Symbolic Natural Language Navigational Planner

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: English, William, Simon, Dominic, Jha, Sumit, Ewetz, Rickard
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author English, William
Simon, Dominic
Jha, Sumit
Ewetz, Rickard
author_facet English, William
Simon, Dominic
Jha, Sumit
Ewetz, Rickard
contents Path planners that can interpret free-form natural language instructions hold promise to automate a wide range of robotics applications. These planners simplify user interactions and enable intuitive control over complex semi-autonomous systems. While existing symbolic approaches offer guarantees on the correctness and efficiency, they struggle to parse free-form natural language inputs. Conversely, neural approaches based on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) can manage natural language inputs but lack performance guarantees. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework for path planning from natural language inputs called NSP. The framework leverages the neural reasoning abilities of LLMs to i) craft symbolic representations of the environment and ii) a symbolic path planning algorithm. Next, a solution to the path planning problem is obtained by executing the algorithm on the environment representation. The framework uses a feedback loop from the symbolic execution environment to the neural generation process to self-correct syntax errors and satisfy execution time constraints. We evaluate our neuro-symbolic approach using a benchmark suite with 1500 path-planning problems. The experimental evaluation shows that our neuro-symbolic approach produces 90.1% valid paths that are on average 19-77% shorter than state-of-the-art neural approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_06859
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NSP: A Neuro-Symbolic Natural Language Navigational Planner
English, William
Simon, Dominic
Jha, Sumit
Ewetz, Rickard
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
Path planners that can interpret free-form natural language instructions hold promise to automate a wide range of robotics applications. These planners simplify user interactions and enable intuitive control over complex semi-autonomous systems. While existing symbolic approaches offer guarantees on the correctness and efficiency, they struggle to parse free-form natural language inputs. Conversely, neural approaches based on pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) can manage natural language inputs but lack performance guarantees. In this paper, we propose a neuro-symbolic framework for path planning from natural language inputs called NSP. The framework leverages the neural reasoning abilities of LLMs to i) craft symbolic representations of the environment and ii) a symbolic path planning algorithm. Next, a solution to the path planning problem is obtained by executing the algorithm on the environment representation. The framework uses a feedback loop from the symbolic execution environment to the neural generation process to self-correct syntax errors and satisfy execution time constraints. We evaluate our neuro-symbolic approach using a benchmark suite with 1500 path-planning problems. The experimental evaluation shows that our neuro-symbolic approach produces 90.1% valid paths that are on average 19-77% shorter than state-of-the-art neural approaches.
title NSP: A Neuro-Symbolic Natural Language Navigational Planner
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06859