A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection

Tao Li, Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang, Yang Li


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capacity at planning and executing a high-level goal in a live computer environment (e.g. MiniWoB++). To perform a task, recent works often require a model to learn from trace examples of the task via either supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. Without these trace examples, it remains a challenge how an agent can autonomously learn and improve its control on a computer, which limits the ability of an agent to perform a new task. We approach this problem with a zero-shot agent that requires no given expert traces. Our agent plans for executable actions on a partially observed environment, and iteratively progresses a task by identifying and learning from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. On the easy tasks of MiniWoB++, we show that our zero-shot agent often outperforms recent SoTAs, with more efficient reasoning. For tasks with more complexity, our reflective agent performs on par with prior best models, even though previous works had the advantages of accessing expert traces or additional screen information.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.753
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11261–11274
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.753
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.753
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tao Li, Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang, and Yang Li. 2023. A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11261–11274, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection (Li et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.753.pdf