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Main Authors: Zhou, Wangchunshu, Ou, Yixin, Ding, Shengwei, Li, Long, Wu, Jialong, Wang, Tiannan, Chen, Jiamin, Wang, Shuai, Xu, Xiaohua, Zhang, Ningyu, Chen, Huajun, Jiang, Yuchen Eleanor
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18532
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author Zhou, Wangchunshu
Ou, Yixin
Ding, Shengwei
Li, Long
Wu, Jialong
Wang, Tiannan
Chen, Jiamin
Wang, Shuai
Xu, Xiaohua
Zhang, Ningyu
Chen, Huajun
Jiang, Yuchen Eleanor
author_facet Zhou, Wangchunshu
Ou, Yixin
Ding, Shengwei
Li, Long
Wu, Jialong
Wang, Tiannan
Chen, Jiamin
Wang, Shuai
Xu, Xiaohua
Zhang, Ningyu
Chen, Huajun
Jiang, Yuchen Eleanor
contents The AI community has been exploring a pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing "language agents", which are complex large language models (LLMs) pipelines involving both prompting techniques and tool usage methods. While language agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many real-world tasks, a fundamental limitation of current language agents research is that they are model-centric, or engineering-centric. That's to say, the progress on prompts, tools, and pipelines of language agents requires substantial manual engineering efforts from human experts rather than automatically learning from data. We believe the transition from model-centric, or engineering-centric, to data-centric, i.e., the ability of language agents to autonomously learn and evolve in environments, is the key for them to possibly achieve AGI. In this work, we introduce agent symbolic learning, a systematic framework that enables language agents to optimize themselves on their own in a data-centric way using symbolic optimizers. Specifically, we consider agents as symbolic networks where learnable weights are defined by prompts, tools, and the way they are stacked together. Agent symbolic learning is designed to optimize the symbolic network within language agents by mimicking two fundamental algorithms in connectionist learning: back-propagation and gradient descent. Instead of dealing with numeric weights, agent symbolic learning works with natural language simulacrums of weights, loss, and gradients. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on both standard benchmarks and complex real-world tasks and show that agent symbolic learning enables language agents to update themselves after being created and deployed in the wild, resulting in "self-evolving agents".
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_18532
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Symbolic Learning Enables Self-Evolving Agents
Zhou, Wangchunshu
Ou, Yixin
Ding, Shengwei
Li, Long
Wu, Jialong
Wang, Tiannan
Chen, Jiamin
Wang, Shuai
Xu, Xiaohua
Zhang, Ningyu
Chen, Huajun
Jiang, Yuchen Eleanor
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The AI community has been exploring a pathway to artificial general intelligence (AGI) by developing "language agents", which are complex large language models (LLMs) pipelines involving both prompting techniques and tool usage methods. While language agents have demonstrated impressive capabilities for many real-world tasks, a fundamental limitation of current language agents research is that they are model-centric, or engineering-centric. That's to say, the progress on prompts, tools, and pipelines of language agents requires substantial manual engineering efforts from human experts rather than automatically learning from data. We believe the transition from model-centric, or engineering-centric, to data-centric, i.e., the ability of language agents to autonomously learn and evolve in environments, is the key for them to possibly achieve AGI. In this work, we introduce agent symbolic learning, a systematic framework that enables language agents to optimize themselves on their own in a data-centric way using symbolic optimizers. Specifically, we consider agents as symbolic networks where learnable weights are defined by prompts, tools, and the way they are stacked together. Agent symbolic learning is designed to optimize the symbolic network within language agents by mimicking two fundamental algorithms in connectionist learning: back-propagation and gradient descent. Instead of dealing with numeric weights, agent symbolic learning works with natural language simulacrums of weights, loss, and gradients. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on both standard benchmarks and complex real-world tasks and show that agent symbolic learning enables language agents to update themselves after being created and deployed in the wild, resulting in "self-evolving agents".
title Symbolic Learning Enables Self-Evolving Agents
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18532