让大模型智能权衡探索成本与不确定性,更优决策。
Calibrate-Then-Act: Cost-Aware Exploration in LLM Agents
- 引入校准-行动框架,让模型显式思考成本与风险
- 在问答和代码任务中提升决策最优性,减少无效探索
- 适合需高效决策的自动化系统开发者
大模型代理在交互环境中需权衡探索成本与信息不确定性。例如,在编程任务中,生成并运行测试的成本虽高但低于运行有缺陷代码的代价。本文将检索增强问答、文件读取编码等任务建模为不确定下的序列决策问题,其性能受隐藏环境状态影响。提出校准-行动(Calibrate-Then-Act, CTA)框架,向代理注入对环境状态的先验推断,使其行为更具环境敏感性,而非仅依赖标准强化学习训练。在合成任务、问答和文件读取任务上的实验表明,通过显式表达成本-收益权衡,代理能发现更优的决策策略。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
LLM agents are deployed in environments where they must interact to acquire information. In these scenarios, the agent must reason about inherent cost-uncertainty tradeoffs in how to act, such as when to stop exploring and commit to an answer. For instance, on a programming task, an agent might run the code it generates, or it might generate tests for that code snippet; the cost of writing and running a test is nonzero, but typically lower than the cost of running buggy code. In this work, we show that we can induce LLM agents to explicitly reason about balancing these cost-uncertainty tradeoffs, then act more optimally in their environments. We formalize multiple tasks, including retrieval-augmented QA and a file reading coding task, as sequential decision-making problems under uncertainty. Each problem has latent environment state that impacts the agent's performance. We introduce a framework called Calibrate-Then-Act (CTA), where we pass the agent an inferred prior about this environment state to enable it to act more optimally. This information qualitatively changes agent behavior, and adds environment sensitivity to the agent which is not learned via standard RL training. Our results on a synthetic task, QA, and file reading show that making cost-benefit tradeoffs explicit with CTA helps agents discover more optimal decision-making strategies.
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