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Reflexion: An autonomous agent with dynamic memory and self-reflection (arxiv.org)
4 points by numlocked on Mar 26, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: After each attempt, the agent writes a note to itself about what went wrong and reads it before trying again, instead of retraining the model. On coding tasks it solved 91% of problems on the first try, beating the previous best system's 80%.

Abstract · Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g., games, compilers, APIs) as goal-driven agents. However, it remains challenging for these language agents to quickly and efficiently learn from trial-and-error as traditional reinforcement learning methods require extensive training samples and expensive model fine-tuning. We propose Reflexion, a novel framework to reinforce language agents not by updating weights, but instead through linguistic feedback. Concretely, Reflexion agents verbally reflect on task feedback signals, then maintain their own reflective text in an episodic memory buffer to induce better decision-making in subsequent trials. Reflexion is flexible enough to incorporate various types (scalar values or free-form language) and sources (external or internally simulated) of feedback signals, and obtains significant improvements over a baseline agent across diverse tasks (sequential decision-making, coding, language reasoning). For example, Reflexion achieves a 91% pass@1 accuracy on the HumanEval coding benchmark, surpassing the previous state-of-the-art GPT-4 that achieves 80%. We also conduct ablation and analysis studies using different feedback signals, feedback incorporation methods, and agent types, and provide insights into how they affect performance.

Noah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Edward Berman, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao
arXiv:2303.11366 · cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Mar 20, 2023 · updated Oct 10, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · v4 contains a few additional experiments

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Also discussed: Apr 2023 (2 points, 0 comments) · Mar 2023 (1 point, 0 comments) · Mar 2023 (3 points, 0 comments)

Looks very similar to what CodeT did with GPT3?