Information Seeking for Robust Decision Making under Partial Observability

Abstract

Explicit information seeking is essential to human problem-solving in practical environments characterized by incomplete information and noisy dynamics. When the true environmental state is not directly observable, humans seek information to update their internal dynamics and inform future decision-making. Although existing Large Language Model (LLM) planning agents have addressed observational uncertainty, they often overlook discrepancies between their internal dynamics and the actual environment. We introduce Information Seeking Decision Planner (InfoSeeker), an LLM decision-making framework that integrates task-oriented planning with information seeking to align internal dynamics and make optimal decisions under uncertainty in both agent observations and environmental dynamics. InfoSeeker prompts an LLM to actively gather information by planning actions to validate its understanding, detect environmental changes, or test hypotheses before generating or revising task-oriented plans. To evaluate InfoSeeker, we introduce a novel benchmark suite featuring partially observable environments with incomplete observations and uncertain dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that InfoSeeker achieves a 74% absolute performance gain over prior methods without sacrificing sample efficiency. Moreover, InfoSeeker generalizes across LLMs and outperforms baselines on established benchmarks such as robotic manipulation and web navigation. These findings underscore the importance of tightly integrating planning and information seeking for robust behavior in partially observable environments. The project page is available at https://infoseekerllm.github.io