ConformalNL2LTL: Translating Natural Language Instructions into Temporal Logic Formulas with Conformal Correctness Guarantees

Abstract

Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is a widely used task specification language for autonomous systems. To mitigate the significant manual effort and expertise required to define LTL-encoded tasks, several methods have been proposed for translating Natural Language (NL) instructions into LTL formulas, which, however, lack correctness guarantees. To address this, we propose a new NL-to-LTL translation method, called ConformalNL2LTL that achieves user-defined translation success rates on unseen NL commands. Our method constructs LTL formulas iteratively by solving a sequence of open-vocabulary question-answering (QA) problems using large language models (LLMs). These QA tasks are handled collaboratively by a primary and an auxiliary model. The primary model answers each QA instance while quantifying uncertainty via conformal prediction; when it is insufficiently certain according to user-defined confidence thresholds, it requests assistance from the auxiliary model and, if necessary, from the user. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that ConformalNL2LTL achieves the desired translation accuracy while minimizing user intervention.