A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05608v1
• Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2025 06:10:53 GMT
• Title: A Goal Without a Plan Is Just a Wish: Efficient and Effective Global Planner Training for Long-Horizon Agent Tasks
• Authors: Shuzheng Si, Haozhe Zhao, Kangyang Luo, Gang Chen, Fanchao Qi, Minjia Zhang, Baobao Chang, Maosong Sun,
• Abstract summary: Agents based on large language models (LLMs) struggle with brainless trial-and-error and generating hallucinatory actions due to a lack of global planning in long-horizon tasks.<n>We introduce a plan-and-execute framework and propose a planner training method to enhance the executor agent's planning abilities without human effort.<n>Experiments show that executor agents equipped with our planner outperform existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art performance.
• Score: 66.86312354478478
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Agents based on large language models (LLMs) struggle with brainless trial-and-error and generating hallucinatory actions due to a lack of global planning in long-horizon tasks. In this paper, we introduce a plan-and-execute framework and propose EAGLET, an efficient and effective planner training method to enhance the executor agent's planning abilities without human effort. Specifically, we train a plug-and-play global planner through a two-step process: we first synthesize high-quality plans from an advanced LLM using our proposed homologous consensus filtering strategy, and apply fine-tuning as a cold start. Moreover, we further improve the planner with a rule-based reinforcement learning stage using a novel executor capability gain reward, ensuring it can handle task instructions of varying difficulty. Experiments on three long-horizon agent tasks show that executor agents equipped with our planner outperform existing methods, achieving new state-of-the-art performance. Meanwhile, EAGLET reduces training costs by 8x compared to RL-based baselines, and it does not require manual effort or extra training data, offering an efficient and effective solution.

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