Reasoning and Acting
Reasoning and Acting (ReAct) is a prompting technique developed by researchers from Princeton University and Google that enhances an LLM’s ability to perform reasoning and acting in simulated environments (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.03629). It allows LLMs to mimic human-like operations in the real world, where we reason verbally and take actions to gain information. ReAct combines reasoning and acting to solve complex language reasoning and decision-making tasks.
While CoT prompting enables LLMs to generate reasoning traces, its lack of access to the external world can lead to issues such as fact hallucination. ReAct addresses this by allowing LLMs to generate both verbal reasoning traces and text actions for a task. These text actions enable the model to interact with its environment (for example, by querying an external knowledge source or using a tool), gather information, and adjust its reasoning accordingly.
The key characteristics of ReAct are...