让大模型在测试时自我改进,用极少数据提升性能。
Self-Improving LLM Agents at Test-Time
- 模型自识别困难样本,生成新训练数据并实时微调
- 平均准确率提升5.48%,仅需其他方法1/68的数据量
- 适合追求高效部署与持续进化的智能体开发者
现有语言模型微调依赖大规模训练数据,但数据收集低效且成本高昂,还无法保证模型在复杂场景下的泛化能力。更重要的是,现有方法很少评估训练样本是否带来新知识,导致冗余投入。本文提出一种测试时自改进方法(TT-SI),分三步:(i) 模型识别自身难以处理的样本(自认知);(ii) 基于不确定样本生成相似新样本(自数据增强);(iii) 在测试时用新样本进行微调(自改进)。对比强模型生成监督信号的测试时蒸馏(TT-D),TT-SI在多个智能体基准上平均提升5.48%绝对准确率,且仅使用68倍更少的训练样本。结果表明,测试时自改进是一种有潜力的新范式,推动智能体实现自演化。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
One paradigm of language model (LM) fine-tuning relies on creating large training datasets, under the assumption that high quantity and diversity will enable models to generalize to novel tasks after post-training. In practice, gathering large sets of data is inefficient, and training on them is prohibitively expensive; worse, there is no guarantee that the resulting model will handle complex scenarios or generalize better. Moreover, existing techniques rarely assess whether a training sample provides novel information or is redundant with the knowledge already acquired by the model, resulting in unnecessary costs. In this work, we explore a new test-time self-improvement method to create more effective and generalizable agentic LMs on-the-fly. The proposed algorithm can be summarized in three steps: (i) first it identifies the samples that model struggles with (self-awareness), (ii) then generates similar examples from detected uncertain samples (self-data augmentation), and (iii) uses these newly generated samples at test-time fine-tuning (self-improvement). We study two variants of this approach: Test-Time Self-Improvement (TT-SI), where the same model generates additional training examples from its own uncertain cases and then learns from them, and contrast this approach with Test-Time Distillation (TT-D), where a stronger model generates similar examples for uncertain cases, enabling student to adapt using distilled supervision. Empirical evaluations across different agent benchmarks demonstrate that TT-SI improves the performance with +5.48% absolute accuracy gain on average across all benchmarks and surpasses other standard learning methods, yet using 68x less training samples. Our findings highlight the promise of TT-SI, demonstrating the potential of self-improvement algorithms at test-time as a new paradigm for building more capable agents toward self-evolution.
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