LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Boshi, Fang, Hao, Eisner, Jason, Van Durme, Benjamin, Su, Yu
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wang, Boshi
Fang, Hao
Eisner, Jason
Van Durme, Benjamin
Su, Yu
author_facet Wang, Boshi
Fang, Hao
Eisner, Jason
Van Durme, Benjamin
Su, Yu
contents Tools are essential for large language models (LLMs) to acquire up-to-date information and take consequential actions in external environments. Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs primarily focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of adding new tools. However, a critical aspect that has surprisingly been understudied is simply how accurately an LLM uses tools for which it has been trained. We find that existing LLMs, including GPT-4 and open-source LLMs specifically fine-tuned for tool use, only reach a correctness rate in the range of 30% to 60%, far from reliable use in practice. We propose a biologically inspired method for tool-augmented LLMs, simulated trial and error (STE), that orchestrates three key mechanisms for successful tool use behaviors in the biological system: trial and error, imagination, and memory. Specifically, STE leverages an LLM's 'imagination' to simulate plausible scenarios for using a tool, after which the LLM interacts with the tool to learn from its execution feedback. Both short-term and long-term memory are employed to improve the depth and breadth of the exploration, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on ToolBench show that STE substantially improves tool learning for LLMs under both in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, bringing a boost of 46.7% to Mistral-Instruct-7B and enabling it to outperform GPT-4. We also show effective continual learning of tools via a simple experience replay strategy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04746
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error
Wang, Boshi
Fang, Hao
Eisner, Jason
Van Durme, Benjamin
Su, Yu
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Tools are essential for large language models (LLMs) to acquire up-to-date information and take consequential actions in external environments. Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs primarily focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of adding new tools. However, a critical aspect that has surprisingly been understudied is simply how accurately an LLM uses tools for which it has been trained. We find that existing LLMs, including GPT-4 and open-source LLMs specifically fine-tuned for tool use, only reach a correctness rate in the range of 30% to 60%, far from reliable use in practice. We propose a biologically inspired method for tool-augmented LLMs, simulated trial and error (STE), that orchestrates three key mechanisms for successful tool use behaviors in the biological system: trial and error, imagination, and memory. Specifically, STE leverages an LLM's 'imagination' to simulate plausible scenarios for using a tool, after which the LLM interacts with the tool to learn from its execution feedback. Both short-term and long-term memory are employed to improve the depth and breadth of the exploration, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on ToolBench show that STE substantially improves tool learning for LLMs under both in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, bringing a boost of 46.7% to Mistral-Instruct-7B and enabling it to outperform GPT-4. We also show effective continual learning of tools via a simple experience replay strategy.
title LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04746