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Poster

BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language

Shikhar Murty · Christopher Manning · Peter Shaw · Mandar Joshi · Kenton Lee

Hall C 4-9 #2610
[ ] [ Paper PDF ]
Wed 24 Jul 4:30 a.m. PDT — 6 a.m. PDT

Abstract:

Following natural language instructions by executing actions in digital environments (e.g. web-browsers and REST APIs) is a challenging task for language model (LM) agents. Unfortunately, LM agents often fail to generalize to new environments without human demonstrations. This work presents BAGEL, a method for bootstrapping LM agents without human supervision. BAGEL converts a seed set of randomly explored trajectories to synthetic demonstrations via round-trips between two noisy LM components: an LM labeler which converts a trajectory into a synthetic instruction, and a zero-shot LM agent which maps the synthetic instruction into a refined trajectory. By performing these round-trips iteratively, BAGEL quickly converts the initial distribution of trajectories towards those that are well-described by natural language. We adapt the base LM agent at test time with in-context learning by retrieving relevant BAGEL demonstrations based on the instruction, and find improvements of over 2-13% absolute on ToolQA and MiniWob++, with up to 13x reduction in execution failures.

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