Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents

Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun


Abstract
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have brought significant changes to various domains, especially through LLM-driven autonomous agents. A representative scenario is in software development, where LLM agents demonstrate efficient collaboration, task division, and assurance of software quality, markedly reducing the need for manual involvement. However, these agents frequently perform a variety of tasks independently, without benefiting from past experiences, which leads to repeated mistakes and inefficient attempts in multi-step task execution. To this end, we introduce Experiential Co-Learning, a novel LLM-agent learning framework in which instructor and assistant agents gather shortcut-oriented experiences from their historical trajectories and use these past experiences for future task execution. The extensive experiments demonstrate that the framework enables agents to tackle unseen software-developing tasks more effectively. We anticipate that our insights will guide LLM agents towards enhanced autonomy and contribute to their evolutionary growth in cooperative learning. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.305
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5628–5640
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.305
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Chen Qian, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Wei Liu, Zihao Xie, YiFei Wang, Weize Chen, Cheng Yang, Xin Cong, Xiaoyin Che, Zhiyuan Liu, and Maosong Sun. 2024. Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5628–5640, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Experiential Co-Learning of Software-Developing Agents (Qian et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.305.pdf