QuBE: Question-based Belief Enhancement for Agentic LLM Reasoning

Minsoo Kim, Jongyoon Kim, Jihyuk Kim, Seung-won Hwang


Abstract
Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), many complex tasks are not easily solved in a single inference step, requiring the use of agentic LLMs in interactive environments. However, agentic LLMs suffer from a phenomenon known as reasoning derailment, due to the indiscriminate incorporation of observations from partially observable environments. We introduce QuBE, a method that enhances agents’ focus on task-relevant contexts, by constructing a belief state via question answering. We validate QuBE through experiments in two agentic LLM scenarios with partial observability: 1) a canonical interactive decision-making scenario using text-based game engines, and 2) an interactive retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenario using search engines. In the AlfWorld text-based game, QuBE outperforms established baselines by substantial margins, and in the search engine scenario, it achieves marked improvements on the BeIR zero-shot retrieval benchmark. The results demonstrate that QuBE significantly mitigates reasoning derailment, refining the decision-making process of LLM agents in partially observed environments.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.1193
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
21403–21423
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1193/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1193
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minsoo Kim, Jongyoon Kim, Jihyuk Kim, and Seung-won Hwang. 2024. QuBE: Question-based Belief Enhancement for Agentic LLM Reasoning. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 21403–21423, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QuBE: Question-based Belief Enhancement for Agentic LLM Reasoning (Kim et al., EMNLP 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1193.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.1193.software.zip