LLMs in the Imaginarium: Tool Learning through Simulated Trial and Error

TL;DR

This paper introduces a biologically inspired trial-and-error method called STE that significantly enhances large language models' ability to accurately use tools, outperforming existing models and improving reliability in external environment interactions.

Contribution

The paper proposes STE, a novel trial-and-error approach inspired by biological systems, to improve tool use accuracy in LLMs through imagination, memory, and interaction feedback.

Findings

STE improves tool use accuracy by 46.7% on ToolBench.

STE enables LLMs to outperform GPT-4 in tool use tasks.

Effective continual learning of tools via experience replay.

Abstract

Tools are essential for large language models (LLMs) to acquire up-to-date information and take consequential actions in external environments. Existing work on tool-augmented LLMs primarily focuses on the broad coverage of tools and the flexibility of adding new tools. However, a critical aspect that has surprisingly been understudied is simply how accurately an LLM uses tools for which it has been trained. We find that existing LLMs, including GPT-4 and open-source LLMs specifically fine-tuned for tool use, only reach a correctness rate in the range of 30% to 60%, far from reliable use in practice. We propose a biologically inspired method for tool-augmented LLMs, simulated trial and error (STE), that orchestrates three key mechanisms for successful tool use behaviors in the biological system: trial and error, imagination, and memory. Specifically, STE leverages an LLM's 'imagination' to simulate plausible scenarios for using a tool, after which the LLM interacts with the tool to learn from its execution feedback. Both short-term and long-term memory are employed to improve the depth and breadth of the exploration, respectively. Comprehensive experiments on ToolBench show that STE substantially improves tool learning for LLMs under both in-context learning and fine-tuning settings, bringing a boost of 46.7% to Mistral-Instruct-7B and enabling it to outperform GPT-4. We also show effective continual learning of tools via a simple experience replay strategy.