Planning Failure
A failure to appropriately construct, maintain, update, or revise the sequence, dependencies, or steps of actions intended to achieve a goal.
Example
A plan for a task with multiple prerequisites postpones a required preliminary check, making the resulting execution order impossible to follow.
Distinctions and cautions
Planning Failure concerns unsuitable steps, sequences, or dependencies even when the goal itself is correctly specified. It is distinct from Tool-selection Failure (choosing an unsuitable tool), Tool-use Failure (incorrectly using a chosen tool), and the broader problems considered under Reasoning Failure.
Evidence
View evidence →
API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs
- Title
- API-Bank: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Tool-Augmented LLMs
- Author / organization
- Li et al.
- Year
- 2023
- Source type / publication status
- EMNLP peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Planning, Tool-selection, Tool-use.
- Scope and limitations
- 73 tools, 314 dialogues and 753 calls; 2023 model set.
- Access / version note
- Published EMNLP.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.187(DOI resolver)
T1: A Tool-Oriented Conversational Dataset for Multi-Turn Agentic Planning
- Title
- T1: A Tool-Oriented Conversational Dataset for Multi-Turn Agentic Planning
- Author / organization
- Chakraborty et al.
- Year
- 2025
- Source type / publication status
- NeurIPS peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Planning, Memory, Tool-use.
- Scope and limitations
- Tool dependencies, multi-turn interactions, cache/replanning; centered on these settings.
- Access / version note
- Published NeurIPS.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.52202/085713-3479(DOI resolver)
CostBench
- Title
- CostBench
- Author / organization
- Liu et al.
- Year
- 2026
- Source type / publication status
- ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Planning Failure and replanning.
- Scope and limitations
- Travel and cost-optimal planning; domain-limited.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.584(DOI resolver)
EVOTOOL
- Title
- EVOTOOL
- Author / organization
- Yang et al.
- Year
- 2026
- Source type / publication status
- ACL peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Planner/selector/caller distinctions and cross-module propagation.
- Scope and limitations
- Modular architecture; not a universal architecture.
- Access / version note
- Published ACL.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- DOI:
10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.2016(DOI resolver)
Goal Misgeneralization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Title
- Goal Misgeneralization in Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Author / organization
- Langosco et al.
- Year
- 2022
- Source type / publication status
- ICML peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- Boundary between Goal Misalignment and Goal Misgeneralization.
- Scope and limitations
- Deep reinforcement learning evidence; not directly an evaluation of LLM agents.
- Access / version note
- Published ICML/PMLR; exact URL not recorded.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- As recorded:
PMLR 162:12004–12019(no URL inferred)
Learning Human Objectives by Evaluating Hypothetical Behavior
- Title
- Learning Human Objectives by Evaluating Hypothetical Behavior
- Author / organization
- Reddy et al.
- Year
- 2020
- Source type / publication status
- ICML peer-reviewed research; published
- Supported concepts / claim context
- User objective alignment; reward-hacking correction.
- Scope and limitations
- Reinforcement-learning and reward-learning context.
- Access / version note
- Published ICML/PMLR; exact URL not recorded.
- Recorded official URL / DOI / identifier
- As recorded:
PMLR 119:8020–8029(no URL inferred)