Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ji, Zhenlan, Wu, Daoyuan, Ma, Pingchuan, Li, Zongjie, Wang, Shuai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17833
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913333244854272
author Ji, Zhenlan
Wu, Daoyuan
Ma, Pingchuan
Li, Zongjie
Wang, Shuai
author_facet Ji, Zhenlan
Wu, Daoyuan
Ma, Pingchuan
Li, Zongjie
Wang, Shuai
contents Agents based on large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness in solving a wide range of tasks by integrating LLMs with key modules such as planning, memory, and tool usage. Increasingly, customers are adopting LLM agents across a variety of commercial applications critical to reliability, including support for mental well-being, chemical synthesis, and software development. Nevertheless, our observations and daily use of LLM agents indicate that they are prone to making erroneous plans, especially when the tasks are complex and require long-term planning. In this paper, we propose PDoctor, a novel and automated approach to testing LLM agents and understanding their erroneous planning. As the first work in this direction, we formulate the detection of erroneous planning as a constraint satisfiability problem: an LLM agent's plan is considered erroneous if its execution violates the constraints derived from the user inputs. To this end, PDoctor first defines a domain-specific language (DSL) for user queries and synthesizes varying inputs with the assistance of the Z3 constraint solver. These synthesized inputs are natural language paragraphs that specify the requirements for completing a series of tasks. Then, PDoctor derives constraints from these requirements to form a testing oracle. We evaluate PDoctor with three mainstream agent frameworks and two powerful LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4). The results show that PDoctor can effectively detect diverse errors in agent planning and provide insights and error characteristics that are valuable to both agent developers and users. We conclude by discussing potential alternative designs and directions to extend PDoctor.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_17833
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Testing and Understanding Erroneous Planning in LLM Agents through Synthesized User Inputs
Ji, Zhenlan
Wu, Daoyuan
Ma, Pingchuan
Li, Zongjie
Wang, Shuai
Artificial Intelligence
Programming Languages
Agents based on large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated effectiveness in solving a wide range of tasks by integrating LLMs with key modules such as planning, memory, and tool usage. Increasingly, customers are adopting LLM agents across a variety of commercial applications critical to reliability, including support for mental well-being, chemical synthesis, and software development. Nevertheless, our observations and daily use of LLM agents indicate that they are prone to making erroneous plans, especially when the tasks are complex and require long-term planning. In this paper, we propose PDoctor, a novel and automated approach to testing LLM agents and understanding their erroneous planning. As the first work in this direction, we formulate the detection of erroneous planning as a constraint satisfiability problem: an LLM agent's plan is considered erroneous if its execution violates the constraints derived from the user inputs. To this end, PDoctor first defines a domain-specific language (DSL) for user queries and synthesizes varying inputs with the assistance of the Z3 constraint solver. These synthesized inputs are natural language paragraphs that specify the requirements for completing a series of tasks. Then, PDoctor derives constraints from these requirements to form a testing oracle. We evaluate PDoctor with three mainstream agent frameworks and two powerful LLMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4). The results show that PDoctor can effectively detect diverse errors in agent planning and provide insights and error characteristics that are valuable to both agent developers and users. We conclude by discussing potential alternative designs and directions to extend PDoctor.
title Testing and Understanding Erroneous Planning in LLM Agents through Synthesized User Inputs
topic Artificial Intelligence
Programming Languages
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17833