A $1000\times$ Faster LLM-enhanced Algorithm For Path Planning in Large-scale Grid Maps

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zeng, Junlin, Zhang, Xin, Zhao, Xiang, Pan, Yan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866918225104601088
author Zeng, Junlin
Zhang, Xin
Zhao, Xiang
Pan, Yan
author_facet Zeng, Junlin
Zhang, Xin
Zhao, Xiang
Pan, Yan
contents Path planning in grid maps, arising from various applications, has garnered significant attention. Existing methods, such as A*, Dijkstra, and their variants, work well for small-scale maps but fail to address large-scale ones due to high search time and memory consumption. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in path planning but still suffer from spatial illusion and poor planning performance. Among all the works, LLM-A* \cite{meng2024llm} leverages LLM to generate a series of waypoints and then uses A* to plan the paths between the neighboring waypoints. In this way, the complete path is constructed. However, LLM-A* still suffers from high computational time for large-scale maps. To fill this gap, we conducted a deep investigation into LLM-A* and found its bottleneck, resulting in limited performance. Accordingly, we design an innovative LLM-enhanced algorithm, abbr. as iLLM-A*. iLLM-A* includes 3 carefully designed mechanisms, including the optimization of A*, an incremental learning method for LLM to generate high-quality waypoints, and the selection of the appropriate waypoints for A* for path planning. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation on various grid maps shows that, compared with LLM-A*, iLLM-A* \textbf{1) achieves more than $1000\times$ speedup on average, and up to $2349.5\times$ speedup in the extreme case, 2) saves up to $58.6\%$ of the memory cost, 3) achieves both obviously shorter path length and lower path length standard deviation.}
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02716
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A $1000\times$ Faster LLM-enhanced Algorithm For Path Planning in Large-scale Grid Maps
Zeng, Junlin
Zhang, Xin
Zhao, Xiang
Pan, Yan
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Path planning in grid maps, arising from various applications, has garnered significant attention. Existing methods, such as A*, Dijkstra, and their variants, work well for small-scale maps but fail to address large-scale ones due to high search time and memory consumption. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in path planning but still suffer from spatial illusion and poor planning performance. Among all the works, LLM-A* \cite{meng2024llm} leverages LLM to generate a series of waypoints and then uses A* to plan the paths between the neighboring waypoints. In this way, the complete path is constructed. However, LLM-A* still suffers from high computational time for large-scale maps. To fill this gap, we conducted a deep investigation into LLM-A* and found its bottleneck, resulting in limited performance. Accordingly, we design an innovative LLM-enhanced algorithm, abbr. as iLLM-A*. iLLM-A* includes 3 carefully designed mechanisms, including the optimization of A*, an incremental learning method for LLM to generate high-quality waypoints, and the selection of the appropriate waypoints for A* for path planning. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation on various grid maps shows that, compared with LLM-A*, iLLM-A* \textbf{1) achieves more than $1000\times$ speedup on average, and up to $2349.5\times$ speedup in the extreme case, 2) saves up to $58.6\%$ of the memory cost, 3) achieves both obviously shorter path length and lower path length standard deviation.}
title A $1000\times$ Faster LLM-enhanced Algorithm For Path Planning in Large-scale Grid Maps
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02716