@inproceedings{gupta-etal-2024-metareflection,
title = "{M}eta{R}eflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections",
author = "Gupta, Priyanshu and
Kirtania, Shashank and
Singha, Ananya and
Gulwani, Sumit and
Radhakrishna, Arjun and
Soares, Gustavo and
Shi, Sherry",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.477",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.477",
pages = "8369--8385",
abstract = "The popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) have unleashed a new age of Language Agents for solving a diverse range of tasks. While contemporary frontier LLMs are capable enough to power reasonably good Language agents, the closed-API model makes it hard to improve in cases they perform sub-optimally. To address this, recent works have explored techniques to improve their performance using self reflection and prompt optimization techniques. While techniques like self reflection work well in an online setup, contemporary prompt optimization techniques are designed to work on simpler tasks. To address this, we introduce METAREFLECTION, a novel offline reinforcement learning technique that enhances the performance of Language Agents by augmenting a semantic memory based on experiential learnings from past trials. We demonstrate the efficacy of METAREFLECTION by evaluating across multiple domains, including complex logical reasoning, biomedical semantic similarity, open world question answering, and vulnerability threat detection, in Infrastructure-as-Code, with different agent design. METAREFLECTION boosts Language agents{'} performance by 4 {\%} to 16.82 {\%} over the raw GPT-4 baseline and performs on par with existing state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques while requiring fewer LLM calls.",
}
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<modsCollection xmlns="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">
<mods ID="gupta-etal-2024-metareflection">
<titleInfo>
<title>MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Priyanshu</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gupta</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Shashank</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Kirtania</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Ananya</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Singha</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sumit</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Gulwani</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Arjun</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Radhakrishna</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Gustavo</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Soares</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Sherry</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Shi</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">author</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<dateIssued>2024-11</dateIssued>
</originInfo>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
<relatedItem type="host">
<titleInfo>
<title>Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing</title>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yaser</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Al-Onaizan</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Mohit</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Bansal</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<name type="personal">
<namePart type="given">Yun-Nung</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Chen</namePart>
<role>
<roleTerm authority="marcrelator" type="text">editor</roleTerm>
</role>
</name>
<originInfo>
<publisher>Association for Computational Linguistics</publisher>
<place>
<placeTerm type="text">Miami, Florida, USA</placeTerm>
</place>
</originInfo>
<genre authority="marcgt">conference publication</genre>
</relatedItem>
<abstract>The popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) have unleashed a new age of Language Agents for solving a diverse range of tasks. While contemporary frontier LLMs are capable enough to power reasonably good Language agents, the closed-API model makes it hard to improve in cases they perform sub-optimally. To address this, recent works have explored techniques to improve their performance using self reflection and prompt optimization techniques. While techniques like self reflection work well in an online setup, contemporary prompt optimization techniques are designed to work on simpler tasks. To address this, we introduce METAREFLECTION, a novel offline reinforcement learning technique that enhances the performance of Language Agents by augmenting a semantic memory based on experiential learnings from past trials. We demonstrate the efficacy of METAREFLECTION by evaluating across multiple domains, including complex logical reasoning, biomedical semantic similarity, open world question answering, and vulnerability threat detection, in Infrastructure-as-Code, with different agent design. METAREFLECTION boosts Language agents’ performance by 4 % to 16.82 % over the raw GPT-4 baseline and performs on par with existing state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques while requiring fewer LLM calls.</abstract>
<identifier type="citekey">gupta-etal-2024-metareflection</identifier>
<identifier type="doi">10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.477</identifier>
<location>
<url>https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.477</url>
</location>
<part>
<date>2024-11</date>
<extent unit="page">
<start>8369</start>
<end>8385</end>
</extent>
</part>
</mods>
</modsCollection>
%0 Conference Proceedings
%T MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections
%A Gupta, Priyanshu
%A Kirtania, Shashank
%A Singha, Ananya
%A Gulwani, Sumit
%A Radhakrishna, Arjun
%A Soares, Gustavo
%A Shi, Sherry
%Y Al-Onaizan, Yaser
%Y Bansal, Mohit
%Y Chen, Yun-Nung
%S Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2024
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Miami, Florida, USA
%F gupta-etal-2024-metareflection
%X The popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) have unleashed a new age of Language Agents for solving a diverse range of tasks. While contemporary frontier LLMs are capable enough to power reasonably good Language agents, the closed-API model makes it hard to improve in cases they perform sub-optimally. To address this, recent works have explored techniques to improve their performance using self reflection and prompt optimization techniques. While techniques like self reflection work well in an online setup, contemporary prompt optimization techniques are designed to work on simpler tasks. To address this, we introduce METAREFLECTION, a novel offline reinforcement learning technique that enhances the performance of Language Agents by augmenting a semantic memory based on experiential learnings from past trials. We demonstrate the efficacy of METAREFLECTION by evaluating across multiple domains, including complex logical reasoning, biomedical semantic similarity, open world question answering, and vulnerability threat detection, in Infrastructure-as-Code, with different agent design. METAREFLECTION boosts Language agents’ performance by 4 % to 16.82 % over the raw GPT-4 baseline and performs on par with existing state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques while requiring fewer LLM calls.
%R 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.477
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.477
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.477
%P 8369-8385
Markdown (Informal)
[MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections](https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.477) (Gupta et al., EMNLP 2024)
ACL
- Priyanshu Gupta, Shashank Kirtania, Ananya Singha, Sumit Gulwani, Arjun Radhakrishna, Gustavo Soares, and Sherry Shi. 2024. MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8369–8385, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.