{"slug": "generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning", "title": "Generating Instance Generators in PDDL Planning", "summary": "A new arXiv paper (2609.06071v1) introduces an approach that uses large language models to generate instance-generation programs for PDDL planning domains, adding prescribed checks for built-in soundness guarantees. The authors report that these automatically generated instance generators return large numbers of sound and diverse instances efficiently, addressing the ad-hoc, manually written domain- and subset-specific generators that have long been standard in the AI Planning community. The work targets scalability limitations of prior reasoning and learning methods for instance generation.", "body_md": "arXiv:2609.06071v1 Announce Type: new \nAbstract: PDDL, the de-facto standard language in the AI Planning community, is designed to specify planning domains: sets of instances that share the same predicates and action schemas. Yet it does not provide any means to specify the actual instance set, i.e., legality constraints on initial states and goal conditions, as well as possibly domain subset constraints specifying an instance subset we are interested in. One consequence of this is that instance generation has always been ad-hoc, with manually written domain- and subset-specific instance generators. Recent work has started to address this, through reasoning and learning methods that however suffer from scalability limitations. Here we introduce an alternative approach, leveraging LLMs to generate instance-generation programs, with built-in soundness guarantees through prescribed checks. We show that these automatically generated instance generators return large numbers of sound and diverse instances efficiently.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning", "canonical_source": "https://www.machinebrief.com/news/generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning-28a4", "published_at": "2026-09-10 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-10 09:23:11.517499+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-research", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["PDDL", "arXiv", "AI Planning community"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/generating-instance-generators-in-pddl-planning.jsonld"}}