[HN Gopher] LLM Agent Paper List
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       LLM Agent Paper List
        
       The most comprehensive repo out there with all the updated must-
       read papers for LLM Agents  From the repo - "We start by the
       general conceptual framework for LLM-based agents: comprising three
       main components: brain, perception, and action, and the framework
       can be tailored to suit different applications."
        
       Author : Anil1331
       Score  : 77 points
       Date   : 2023-09-23 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | djohnston wrote:
       | May I humbly request an MVP list? I'm into this stuff but there
       | are like 60+ papers here.
        
         | Anil1331 wrote:
         | What do you plan to build ? Based on that can suggest relevant
        
         | araes wrote:
         | Your comment got me curious, so I made it into a spreadsheet.
         | 
         | There are 265 papers currently.
         | 
         | If you're curious, there's a reason it feels overwhelming.
         | Here's a plot of the age of the papers relative to now. Its a
         | bit of a wall/tsunami.
         | 
         | https://i.imgur.com/Om7udZR.png
         | 
         | Edit: Because of the shock like character I also postulate
         | several hypotheses:
         | 
         | - It will rapidly expand like a fireball, consuming all of the
         | "air" of possible nearby topics.                 - Possible
         | secondary: Ignition of other topics as possible fuel to extend
         | the publishing "burn."            - Possible secondary: Vacuum
         | implosion when all nearby topic fuel is expended.
         | 
         | - Cause significant destruction (existing wealth, businesses,
         | market segments, ect...)
         | 
         | - Cause many humans to effectively "reflect" due to its
         | impenetrability, effectively rendering those humans permanently
         | downhill as consumers.                 - Possible secondary:
         | Further shocks as the shock wave bends or reflects off of
         | "currently impenetrable" obstructions (topics that do not
         | immediately turn into fuel).
         | 
         | - Cause significant secondary (mostly unrelated) growth in
         | topics impeded by the current suffocating fuel environment
         | (like an old growth forest that has become choked with debris
         | and oppresses all growth)
        
       | bthomas wrote:
       | Does anybody know a good forum for discussing AI agent design? I
       | have a bunch of questions, but too specific for the general LLM
       | application communities.
        
         | tikkun wrote:
         | Autogpt subreddit and discord, and the babyagi discord
        
       | dang wrote:
       | This is not a valid Show HN. Please see
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
       | 
       | I've taken "Show HN" out of the title now.
        
       | catlover76 wrote:
       | Can people ELI5 what an LLM or AI "Agent" is? Sometimes when I
       | see the term used, it makes sense, and other times there seems to
       | be nothing concrete behind it.
       | 
       | [not a comment on OP post]
        
         | DougBTX wrote:
         | It is frameworks vs libraries. An agent decides when to call
         | your code, or possibly someone else's code.
        
         | localhost wrote:
         | I think about agents as being an entity that you can
         | collaborate with. Among other things, it needs 1/ memory, 2/
         | ability to create and execute long-term plans. One of the best
         | papers that I have read on this topic is the Generative Agents
         | paper by Park [1]
         | 
         | Today's LLMs are kind of like Dory from Finding Nemo - you have
         | to recreate the context every time you do a slightly different
         | task, or when the context window for the LLM is no longer
         | sufficient to remember previous turns in a conversation.
         | 
         | An agent can sit on the other side of a piece of collaborative
         | software that was designed for human collaboration. This is why
         | chatbots are the current "killer app" for AI, we already
         | understand how to collaborate with other people via chat.
         | 
         | Now imagine what we can do with more sophisticated pieces of
         | software like Figma or Excel. Disclosure: I work on the Python
         | in Excel feature and we just announced Copilot for Excel a
         | couple of days ago. [2] Other modalities that excite me are
         | tools like Vision Pro which will be an interesting test bed for
         | multi-modal generative agents.
         | 
         | [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442
         | 
         | [2] https://twitter.com/john_lam/status/1704886164753363261
        
         | isaacfung wrote:
         | LLM has no long term memory(limited by context size or you have
         | to do fine tuning which isnt efficient) and can't interact with
         | the outside world.
         | 
         | You can augment it with retrieval systems(vector store, graph
         | db, sql db + lexical/semantic/graph search) and give it access
         | to tools like api, search engine and code interpreter. Then it
         | becomes an agent.
        
         | hall0ween wrote:
         | From my understanding, an agent is a collection of tools that
         | can be navigated by an LLM. It follows an approach called
         | reason-action (react) or thought-action-observation. Spit
         | balling here, thought means getting a prompt and having a
         | response to it (i.e., run particular action). An action
         | executes (e.g., executing code in python repl, using a search a
         | api, pulling info from wikipedia). The LLM receives some
         | feedback (observation) and the process starts over.
        
         | ZunarJ5 wrote:
         | Crash course:
         | 
         | LLM: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-
         | chatgpt-...
         | 
         | Agent: https://lilianweng.github.io/posts/2023-06-23-agent/
        
         | aldarisbm wrote:
         | there's plenty online, but basically an LLM is a model trained
         | on an expansive corpus of data (unstructured, text) and
         | basically trained to mimic human language. It can answers
         | questions using probabilistic logic.
         | 
         | People have been thinking of a way to make LLMs perform actions
         | in the real world, by giving these LLMs "tools".
         | 
         | An LLM with tools that can perform tasks would be an AI Agent
        
         | jondwillis wrote:
         | here- try to my buggy, unfinished demo, you'll probably
         | understand it: https://waggledance.ai
         | 
         | source is available if you tap the GH icon in the footer.
        
         | thoughtlede wrote:
         | I would characterize an LLM Agent to be "a software application
         | of LLM" that is typically used to solve a problem that requires
         | multiple steps.
         | 
         | The application uses an LLM to breakdown the problem into
         | pieces and asks the LLM to choose a tool that is suited to
         | handle each piece. The application then invokes the tool to
         | solve that piece of the problem. This is iteratively done until
         | the original problem is solved or determined to be unsolvable.
         | 
         | There are many agent variations, depending on whether you
         | breakdown the problem once at the beginning, or understand what
         | to do next based on the outcome of the previous step, or
         | constantly evaluate and reprioritize which piece of the problem
         | to solve next.
         | 
         | Because you rely on an LLM to understand the problem, if you
         | chose an LLM that exhibits good world understanding, and
         | designed the LLM Agent well enough, then you can use it to
         | solve problems that traditionally required deterministic code.
        
         | itissid wrote:
         | Its a fancy term for s piece of code that has some
         | context(memory) and can communicate with other AI APIs(aka lang
         | chain) including itself. It can retrieve certain information
         | from other sources(called vector stores).
         | 
         | What makes it different from other programs is that Agents can
         | do probabilistic inference on the closure natural language,
         | i.e. they can predict(P(Y|X) as well as generate(P(X, y)). Both
         | of these are very hard to do with any _one_ previous model and
         | hence with any service that could combine software API +
         | Classic ML Model(pre Generative+Discriminative models like
         | llm).
        
         | jsemrau wrote:
         | The Encyclopedia Autonomica defines Agent as a software that is
         | capable of reasoning, using memory, plan its actions, and using
         | tools. Or in short:
         | 
         | Agent= Reasoning + Memory + Planning + Tools
        
         | lukebuehler wrote:
         | Agents have agency: they do stuff. The way the do it is by
         | calling code or writing code and then executing it. They need
         | some retrieval system too (often called memory) that selects
         | the relevant possible actions for a current context.
         | 
         | I wrote this article recently that outlines what a system needs
         | to run agents: https://github.com/lukebuehler/agent-
         | os/blob/main/docs/artic...
        
       | madrox wrote:
       | Having spent the last three months with Agents I'm starting to
       | develop a saying: "Any sufficiently advanced agent is
       | indistinguishable from a DSL"
       | 
       | I'm becoming convinced Agents are mostly novelty. They aren't
       | Turing complete. They're fun to implement, but any algorithm they
       | run to solve a task can't be inspected and can go awry with
       | complex logic. You can accomplish the same thing by asking the
       | LLM to write code in whatever language, and it's more reliable.
       | There is more reluctance to do that though, because the idea of a
       | BE environment that runs user generated scripts is scary.
        
         | LASR wrote:
         | Curious how you went with this approach.
         | 
         | I too have been playing with agents. But I've explicitly biased
         | away from having them do things that can achieved directly with
         | code.
         | 
         | Stringing together tool selection into steps with reasoning imo
         | is the crucial brain layer. Code is one of the tools. I've also
         | gone with a kind of preemptive memory, where the brain gets
         | injected with relevant memory automatically, instead of it
         | requesting for it. Same for retrieval from the internet.
         | 
         | But wanted to understand how you're thinking about.
        
           | madrox wrote:
           | You can string tools together in code as well, and have an
           | LLM reinterpret the final results in text if you want.
           | There's the middle bit when you ask the Agent to reason that
           | works better if you just ask it to write code and give it
           | functions to call instead of tools.
        
         | broken_clock wrote:
         | What have you been trying to use agents for?
         | 
         | I think most of the actual value created short/medium-term with
         | agents will be in entertainment where things going awry is OK
         | and no action they take can really be catastrophic.
         | 
         | Some people are already spending a ton of time on character.ai
         | (https://beta.character.ai). There are sims-like games like ai-
         | town (https://www.convex.dev/ai-town). My friend and I made an
         | open-source murder mystery novella with agents
         | (https://gron.games).
         | 
         | We found that a lot of the actions they take are pretty low
         | stakes, so the correctness issues are much less important (in
         | ai-town, they just talk with each other, in our game, they just
         | beat you or run away if you interrogate them poorly).
        
           | madrox wrote:
           | My current work is using LLMs in fintech, but my background
           | is in entertainment and has been where most of side projects
           | have gone. LLMs are great generative tools, but Agents are
           | reasoning tools. They implicitly execute an algorithm and
           | interpret the results. An agent will never reason as well as
           | imperative code.
           | 
           | I think this is why agents appear suited to entertainment,
           | but this is almost a different topic that I could rant about
           | for hours. There's a whimsical element of randomness in what
           | the character may do that the programmer does not need to
           | explicitly design. However, I think that whimsy has limited
           | reach, so while the developer may be more amused by their own
           | creation it has limited appeal.
        
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       (page generated 2023-09-23 23:02 UTC)