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Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback (arxiv.org)
3 points by saurabh20n on Apr 10, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A language model writes an answer, then critiques its own work and rewrites it, repeating the loop without any extra training. Across seven tasks, this self-editing beat the usual one-shot answers, raising task scores by about 20 points on average.

Abstract

Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an initial output using an LLMs; then, the same LLMs provides feedback for its output and uses it to refine itself, iteratively. Self-Refine does not require any supervised training data, additional training, or reinforcement learning, and instead uses a single LLM as the generator, refiner, and feedback provider. We evaluate Self-Refine across 7 diverse tasks, ranging from dialog response generation to mathematical reasoning, using state-of-the-art (GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4) LLMs. Across all evaluated tasks, outputs generated with Self-Refine are preferred by humans and automatic metrics over those generated with the same LLM using conventional one-step generation, improving by ~20% absolute on average in task performance. Our work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 can be further improved at test time using our simple, standalone approach.

Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan, Luyu Gao, Sarah Wiegreffe, Uri Alon, Nouha Dziri, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Yiming Yang, Shashank Gupta, Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, et al.
arXiv:2303.17651 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Mar 30, 2023 · updated May 25, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Code, data, and demo at https://selfrefine.info/

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