REACT: SYNERGIZING REASONING AND ACTING IN LANGUAGE MODELS

Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran, Karthik Narasimhan, Yuan Cao

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

251 Scopus citations

Abstract

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics. In this paper, we explore the use of LLMs to generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner, allowing for greater synergy between the two: reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with and gather additional information from external sources such as knowledge bases or environments. We apply our approach, named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines in addition to improved human interpretability and trustworthiness. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes prevalent issues of hallucination and error propagation in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generating human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. Furthermore, on two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples.

Original languageEnglish (US)
StatePublished - 2023
Externally publishedYes
Event11th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023 - Kigali, Rwanda
Duration: May 1 2023May 5 2023

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Learning Representations, ICLR 2023
Country/TerritoryRwanda
CityKigali
Period5/1/235/5/23

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Education
  • Linguistics and Language

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