What is ReAct - Reasoning and Acting in Language Models

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across tasks in language understanding and interactive decision making, their abilities for reasoning (e.g. chain-of-thought prompting) and acting (e.g. action plan generation) have primarily been studied as separate topics

Reasoning traces help the model induce, track, and update action plans as well as handle exceptions, while actions allow it to interface with external sources, such as knowledge bases or environments, to gather additional information. 

named ReAct, to a diverse set of language and decision making tasks and demonstrate its effectiveness over state-of-the-art baselines, as well as improved human interpretability and trustworthiness over methods without reasoning or acting components. Concretely, on question answering (HotpotQA) and fact verification (Fever), ReAct overcomes issues of hallucination and error propagation prevalent in chain-of-thought reasoning by interacting with a simple Wikipedia API, and generates human-like task-solving trajectories that are more interpretable than baselines without reasoning traces. On two interactive decision making benchmarks (ALFWorld and WebShop), ReAct outperforms imitation and reinforcement learning methods by an absolute success rate of 34% and 10% respectively, while being prompted with only one or two in-context examples.

https://react-lm.github.io/

References:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629

https://medium.com/data-science-at-microsoft/automating-data-analytics-with-chatgpt-827a51eaa2c

https://react-lm.github.io/