From Abstraction to Action: DSLs for Natural Language Abstraction Interpretation and Execution

Amit Lisha, Reut Tsarfaty

Natural-language instructions often rely on high-level abstractions, such as asking an agent to ``stack blocks in a pyramid.'' Interpreting abstract instructions requires models to both identify the abstraction intended by the speaker, and unroll it into the many concrete actions that instantiate it. Language models struggle here: prior work has shown that performance degrades as the level of abstraction in the instruction rises. To bridge the gap between natural language abstraction and concrete actions, we propose to borrow from coding environments the notion of a {\em domain-specific language} (DSL), an explicit representation layer whose documented primitives name recurring abstractions that expand into concrete actions. We demonstrate the efficacy of DSLs for NL interpretation on \textsc{Hexagons}, a visually-grounded instruction-following task graded for abstraction. We further ask whether language models can induce such DSLs themselves from domain data. Our results show that while code generation consistently improves over direct inference, code generation over a human-curated DSL yields dramatic gains, up to 10 absolute F1 points, reaching the human skyline, with gains…