StateAct: Enhancing LLM Base Agents via Self-prompting and State-tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rozanov, Nikolai, Rei, Marek
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Rozanov, Nikolai
Rei, Marek
author_facet Rozanov, Nikolai
Rei, Marek
contents Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as autonomous agents, tackling tasks from robotics to web navigation. Their performance depends on the underlying base agent. Existing methods, however, struggle with long-context reasoning and goal adherence. We introduce StateAct, a novel and efficient base agent that enhances decision-making through (1) self-prompting, which reinforces task goals at every step, and (2) chain-of-states, an extension of chain-of-thought that tracks state information over time. StateAct outperforms ReAct, the previous best base agent, by over 10% on Alfworld, 30% on Textcraft, and 7% on Webshop across multiple frontier LLMs. We also demonstrate that StateAct can be used as a drop-in replacement for ReAct with advanced LLM agent methods such as test-time scaling, yielding an additional 12% gain on Textcraft. By improving efficiency and long-range reasoning without requiring additional training or retrieval, StateAct provides a scalable foundation for LLM agents. We open source our code to support further research at https://github.com/ai-nikolai/stateact .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_02810
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle StateAct: Enhancing LLM Base Agents via Self-prompting and State-tracking
Rozanov, Nikolai
Rei, Marek
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as autonomous agents, tackling tasks from robotics to web navigation. Their performance depends on the underlying base agent. Existing methods, however, struggle with long-context reasoning and goal adherence. We introduce StateAct, a novel and efficient base agent that enhances decision-making through (1) self-prompting, which reinforces task goals at every step, and (2) chain-of-states, an extension of chain-of-thought that tracks state information over time. StateAct outperforms ReAct, the previous best base agent, by over 10% on Alfworld, 30% on Textcraft, and 7% on Webshop across multiple frontier LLMs. We also demonstrate that StateAct can be used as a drop-in replacement for ReAct with advanced LLM agent methods such as test-time scaling, yielding an additional 12% gain on Textcraft. By improving efficiency and long-range reasoning without requiring additional training or retrieval, StateAct provides a scalable foundation for LLM agents. We open source our code to support further research at https://github.com/ai-nikolai/stateact .
title StateAct: Enhancing LLM Base Agents via Self-prompting and State-tracking
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02810