operations planners

Abstract: Real-world decision problems combine two qualitatively different kinds of constraints: requirements that must be satisfied, called hard constraints, and preferences that can be violated, called soft constraints. Because these problems are often posed to decision-makers in natural language, large language models offer a natural tool for assisting with their solution. This has given rise to autoformulation, which focuses on using LLMs to translate natural-language descriptions of decision problems into executable mathematical optimization models. However, this research often neglects soft constraints like those proposed by consumers, managers, and planners, despite the fact that many practical problems require modeling them explicitly. We introduce ASTOR, an inference-time framework that maps a natural-language decision problem to a grammar-guided abstract syntax tree (AST) before deterministically compiling the resulting representation into executable optimization code. We also introduce SoftOR, a unified benchmark of natural language problems which focuses on soft constraint formulations. On SoftOR, ASTOR achieves the best aggregate accuracy among comparable single-request and multi-agent LLM methods while remaining competitive on standard autoformulation benchmarks that include only hard constraints. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/astor-softor-iclr-E34C/README.md.

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as formalizers: given a reasoning problem expressed in natural language, they produce a formal specification that a symbolic solver can then solve, with guarantees relative to that specification. Many specifications are runnable yet semantically wrong, encoding incorrect constraints, domains, objectives, predicates, or goals, and solver-error feedback dries up once execution succeeds. Purely LLM-based diagnosis, lacking a formal ground truth, often fails to spot these errors, and its ungrounded critiques cause regressions in 11.8% of initially correct specifications in our experiments. We propose DRAGO, a repair framework that replaces this ungrounded critique with deterministic, formalism-specific diagnosis, and retains a rewrite only when the diagnosed error weight strictly decreases under a reference-free acceptance predicate. Across five benchmarks spanning logical reasoning (SMT-LIB2), constraint programming (MiniZinc), and planning (PDDL), DRAGO cuts regressions by nearly an order of magnitude, to 1.3%, while improving answer accuracy by 12.9 percentage points over zero-shot formalization and 8.7 percentage points over LLM-diagnostic repair, averaged across benchmarks. We also uncover two rendering defects in Planetarium that cause 50% (3,086 instances) of its floor-tile split to be inconsistent with the reference formalizations, and release a corrected split.

Abstract: Next-token prediction has driven remarkable progress in large language models, yet a growing body of evidence suggests that they can struggle on problems governed by complex global constraints. In this work, we focus on this regime and ask whether some of these limitations arise from the inference interface induced by next-token prediction itself. We study this question through blackboard intelligence: an inference-time perspective in which a model works on a fixed, revisable canvas and searches over candidate solution states rather than committing to a causal, left-to-right trajectory. We instantiate this idea with diffusion language models, whose any-order prediction interface naturally exposes predictions over partially filled solution states. Our key observation is that mean confidence, a simple model-internal quantity available from the standard masked diffusion objective, provides a useful proxy for global coherence and can guide inference-time search and revision. Empirically, across ZebraLogic, Nurse Rostering, and Job-Shop Scheduling, Blackboard consistently improves inference while holding the fine-tuned LLaDA-8B-Instruct checkpoint fixed and substantially outperforms same-scale autoregressive baselines, reaching 90.4% accuracy on ZebraLogic-Hard, 76.4% exact feasibility on Nurse Rostering, and 80.2% optimality on JSSP. Stronger autoregressive search and refinement also fail to close the gap on ZebraLogic-Hard, while Blackboard surpasses tested frontier LLMs there and on JSSP despite their substantially greater scale and strong test-time reasoning. We open-source our codebase at https://github.com/jwoosang1/blackboard-intelligence.

Abstract: Quantum-inspired evolutionary optimization (QIEO) represents design variables as a set of qubits and searches a continuous, multi-dimensional landscape through rotation of the qubit's amplitude pair. Every generation rotates those amplitudes toward a single elite, which corresponds to that generation's best. The update is cheap, almost parameter-free, and well-suited for massive parallel implementation, which has encouraged its adoption in engineering, design, and planning applications. However, there are critical issues with this formulation, principally, the treatment of design variables as independent probability components which make it incapable of exploiting local curvature, anisotropy, or variable coupling. Despite this, QIEO is believed to hold promise, and has been used extensively to solve real-world problems, with significant qualitative and computational advantage over its classical counterpart, Genetic Algorithm (GA). A collection of 256 (actually 508; 256 unshifted + 252 shifted, 4 could not be shifted) continuous function are selected from the prior works, in such a way that they represent eleven landscape characteristics, namely continuity, differentiability, separability, scalability, modality, convexity, conditioning, symmetry, maximum dimensionality, dimension dependency, and the coupling pattern of the design variables. These functions are then solved by three QIEO variants, two GA encodings and Hansen's Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES). The results are evaluated in terms of computational cost, solution precision, and specialization across landscape characteristics. They identify the conditions under which QIEO provides competitive performance, clarify where its independent-variable representation becomes limiting, and establish whether particular QIEO variants offer advantages for specific landscape characteristics.

Abstract: We introduce GenOR-Twin, a neuro-symbolic framework that bridges the translation gap between unstructured operational logs and rigorous mathematical optimization. Our architecture uniquely positions Large Language Models as semantic translators rather than direct solvers, ensuring that the system retains the feasibility guarantees of exact combinatorial methods. { \color{red}We design a dynamic constraint injection mechanism (the runtime translation of qualitative disruption events into formal mathematical constraints) that allows the system to structurally modify the optimization problem's feasibility region in real-time based on qualitative human inputs. The resulting bidirectional coupling---where operational observations update the virtual model state and optimized decisions are reflected back into the Knowledge Graph---satisfies the synchronization requirement of a proper Digital Twin. The framework features an adaptive decision policy} that automatically selects between low-complexity schedule repair and full re-optimization by analyzing the available system slack. Finally, we demonstrate the generalization of this approach across six distinct optimization domains, {\color{red}turning static models into resilient systems that adapt to the operational uncertainty and variability of real-world environments.}