让大模型在推理时像人一样从经验中持续学习,提升性能。
Chain-of-Experience for Continual LLM Improvement

- 通过迭代交互积累经验,形成持续改进的闭环。
- 自反馈使性能平均提升5.6%,API成本降低19%。
- 适合追求推理阶段性能优化的研究者和工程师。
人类通过经验持续学习,而传统大语言模型评估忽略其在推理阶段通过交互改进的能力。本文研究大模型在测试时如何通过迭代经验实现自我提升,提出链式经验(Chain-of-Experience, CoE)框架,即模型通过与自身或环境反馈的反复交互,积累经验痕迹,形成超越零样本推理的持续改进机制。我们采用多种反馈方式,包括模型自反馈及正确性、公开编码测试通过率等环境信号,在数学、编程和知识三个领域,对8个大模型(含GPT-5、Gemini-2.5 Pro、Claude-4.5 Sonnet)进行评估。结果表明,利用迭代经验显著优于无反馈基线,仅使用自反馈即可实现5.6%的整体性能提升,并在任务与模型间实现19%的API成本下降。结合互补反馈通道(如模型与正确性信号)可进一步增益,且CoE在单位令牌准确率上优于现有测试时策略。观察到基础模型能力与改进潜力正相关,模型对弱或虚假反馈保持鲁棒性,不同反馈促进不同方面的改进,多数增益集中在迭代初期。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Humans continuously learn from experience, whereas conventional large language model (LLM) evaluations ignore the models' ability to improve through inference-time interaction. In this paper, we study how LLMs learn from iterative experience at test time, a setting we refer to as Chain-of-Experience (CoE), where models accumulate experiential traces through iterative interactions with self or environmental feedback to form a continual improvement loop beyond zero-shot inference. We instantiate CoE with diverse feedback mechanisms, including model self-feedback and environmental signals such as correctness or public coding test pass rates, and evaluate across math, coding, and knowledge domains using 8 LLMs, including GPT-5, Gemini-2.5 Pro, Claude-4.5 Sonnet. Our study shows that leveraging iterative experience consistently outperforms feedback-free baselines, achieving substantial gains with self feedback alone, alongside a 5.6% overall improvement and 19% lower API cost across tasks and models. We further show that combining complementary feedback channels (e.g., model and correctness signals) yields additional gains, and that CoE delivers higher accuracy per token than existing test-time strategies. We observe a positive correlation between LLM base ability and improvement capacity, and show that models remain robust under weak or spurious feedback, with different feedback contributing to distinct improvement aspects and most gains emerging early in the iterations.
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