Describe, Explain, Plan and Select: Interactive Planning with LLMs Enables Open-World Multi-Task Agents

Abstract

In this paper, we study the problem of planning in Minecraft, a popular, democratized yet challenging open-ended environment for developing multi-task embodied agents. We've found two primary challenges of empowering such agents with planning: 1) planning in an open-ended world like Minecraft requires precise and multi-step reasoning due to the long-term nature of the tasks, and 2) as vanilla planners do not consider the achievability of the current agent when ordering parallel sub-goals within a complicated plan, the resulting plan could be inefficient. To this end, we propose ``$\underline{D}$escribe, $\underline{E}$xplain, $\underline{P}$lan and $\underline{S}$elect'' ($\textbf{DEPS}$), an interactive planning approach based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach helps with better error correction from the feedback during the long-haul planning, while also bringing the sense of proximity via goal $\textbf{Selector}$, a learnable module that ranks parallel sub-goals based on the estimated steps of completion and improves the original plan accordingly. Our experiments mark the milestone of the first zero-shot multi-task agent that can robustly accomplish 70+ Minecraft tasks and nearly double the overall performances. Further testing reveals our method's general effectiveness in popularly adopted non-open-ended domains as well (i.e., ALFWorld and tabletop manipulation). The ablation and exploratory studies detail how our design beats the counterparts and provide a promising update on the $\texttt{ObtainDiamond}$ grand challenge with our approach.