English

MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections

Computation and Language 2024-10-11 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

The popularity of Large Language Models (LLMs) have unleashed a new age ofLanguage Agents for solving a diverse range of tasks. While contemporary frontier LLMs are capable enough to power reasonably good Language agents, the closed-API model makes it hard to improve in cases they perform sub-optimally. To address this, recent works have explored ways to improve their performance using techniques like self-reflection and prompt optimization. Unfortunately, techniques like self-reflection can be used only in an online setup, while contemporary prompt optimization techniques are designed and tested to work on simple tasks. To this end, we introduce MetaReflection, a novel offline reinforcement learning technique that enhances the performance of Language Agents by augmenting a semantic memory based on experiential learnings from past trials. We demonstrate the efficacy of MetaReflection by evaluating across multiple domains, including complex logical reasoning, biomedical semantic similarity, open world question answering, and vulnerability threat detection, in Infrastructure-as-Code, spanning different agent designs. MetaReflection boosts Language agents' performance by 4% to 16.82% over the raw GPT-4 baseline and performs on par with existing state-of-the-art prompt optimization techniques while requiring fewer LLM calls.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.13009,
  title  = {MetaReflection: Learning Instructions for Language Agents using Past Reflections},
  author = {Priyanshu Gupta and Shashank Kirtania and Ananya Singha and Sumit Gulwani and Arjun Radhakrishna and Sherry Shi and Gustavo Soares},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.13009},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

We release our experimental code at: https://aka.ms/metareflection-code

R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:34:39.777Z