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ReST meets ReAct: Self-Improvement for Multi-Step Reasoning LLM Agent

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arxiv 2312.10003 v1 pith:HLHTXXLS submitted 2023-12-15 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords agentexternalknowledgemodellanguagelargemulti-stepquestions
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Answering complex natural language questions often necessitates multi-step reasoning and integrating external information. Several systems have combined knowledge retrieval with a large language model (LLM) to answer such questions. These systems, however, suffer from various failure cases, and we cannot directly train them end-to-end to fix such failures, as interaction with external knowledge is non-differentiable. To address these deficiencies, we define a ReAct-style LLM agent with the ability to reason and act upon external knowledge. We further refine the agent through a ReST-like method that iteratively trains on previous trajectories, employing growing-batch reinforcement learning with AI feedback for continuous self-improvement and self-distillation. Starting from a prompted large model and after just two iterations of the algorithm, we can produce a fine-tuned small model that achieves comparable performance on challenging compositional question-answering benchmarks with two orders of magnitude fewer parameters.

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Forward citations

Cited by 8 Pith papers

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