Cognitive Map for Language Models: Optimal Planning via Verbally Representing the World Model

Language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, yet they struggle with planning tasks requiring multi-step simulations. Inspired by human cognitive processes, this paper investigates the optimal planning power of language models that can construct a cognitive map of a given environment. Our experiments demonstrate that cognitive map significantly enhances the performance of both optimal and reachable planning generation ability in the Gridworld path planning task. We observe that our method showcases two key characteristics similar to human cognition: \textbf{generalization of its planning ability to extrapolated environments and rapid adaptation with limited training data.} We hope our findings in the Gridworld task provide insights into modeling human cognitive processes in language models, potentially leading to the development of more advanced and robust systems that better resemble human cognition.