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arXiv · 2512.09629

End-to-end PDDL Planning with Hardcoded and Dynamic Agents

Emanuele La Malfa·Ping Zhu·Samuele Marro·Sara Bernardini·Michael Wooldridge
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Abstract

We present an end-to-end framework for planning supported by verifiers. An orchestrator receives a human specification written in natural language and converts it into a PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) model, where the domain and problem are iteratively refined by sub-modules (agents) to address common planning requirements, such as time constraints and optimality, as well as ambiguities and contradictions that may exist in the human specification. We support two categories of agents: hardcoded, which are informed by logs and error traces and have a pre-defined goal (e.g., fix issues with PDDL syntax, check temporal constraints), and dynamic, which have no predefined goal but adapt to the specific domain and revise the latent planning abstraction. The validated domain and problem are then passed to an external planning engine to generate a plan. The orchestrator and agents are powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) and require no human intervention at any stage of the process. Finally, a module translates the final plan back into natural language to improve human readability while maintaining the correctness of each step. We demonstrate the flexibility and effectiveness of our framework on GPT-\{4o, 5-mini, 5.4\}, and Gemini-\{2.5, 3\}-flash across more than ten domains and tasks, including the Google NaturalPlan benchmark, Planbench, and classic planning problems like Sokoban, Blocksworld and the Tower of Hanoi, where LLMs are known to struggle even with small instances. Our framework can be integrated with any PDDL planning engine and validator (we successfully tested Fast Downward, LPG, POPF, VAL, and uVAL) and represents a significant step toward end-to-end planning aided by LLMs.

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Emanuele La Malfa, Ping Zhu, Samuele Marro, Sara Bernardini, Michael Wooldridge. 2026-05-08. End-to-end PDDL Planning with Hardcoded and Dynamic Agents. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09629

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