BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language
<|reference_start|>BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language: Following natural language instructions by executing actions in digital environments (e.g. web-browsers and REST APIs) is a challenging task for language model (LM) agents. Unfortunately, LM agents often fail to generalize to new environments without human demonstrations. This work presents BAGEL, a method for bootstrapping LM agents without human supervision. BAGEL converts a seed set of randomly explored trajectories or synthetic instructions, into demonstrations, via round-trips between two noisy LM components: an LM labeler which converts a trajectory into a synthetic instruction, and a zero-shot LM agent which maps the synthetic instruction into a refined trajectory. By performing these round-trips iteratively, BAGEL quickly converts the initial distribution of trajectories towards those that are well-described by natural language. We use BAGEL demonstrations to adapt a zero shot LM agent at test time via in-context learning over retrieved demonstrations, and find improvements of over 2-13% absolute on ToolQA and MiniWob++, with up to 13x reduction in execution failures.<|reference_end|>
@article{murty2024bagel:,
    title={BAGEL: Bootstrapping Agents by Guiding Exploration with Language},
    author={Shikhar Murty, Christopher Manning, Peter Shaw, Mandar Joshi, Kenton
  Lee},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.08140},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.08140},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}