Agents & Tool Use · 2023
Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning
Reflexion added a verbal self-reflection loop in which an agent turns feedback from a failed attempt into written critiques stored in memory and used to improve the next attempt, without updating model weights.
Editorial record
Plain-language summary
After each trajectory, an evaluator produces a reward or error signal, and the agent generates a natural-language reflection on what went wrong, which is appended to an episodic memory buffer that conditions subsequent trials. Because learning happens through text in the context window rather than gradient updates, the same frozen model improves across attempts on decision-making, coding, and reasoning benchmarks. This provided a cheap iterative-improvement mechanism for agents that reuses a model's own language ability as the update rule.
Knowledge graph
Relationships
Antecedents
CombinesEvidence: Strongly supported
SWE-agent / OpenHands (autonomous software engineering)
Self-reflection feeds SWE agents
P-235
Descendants
ExtendsEvidence: Direct
ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in LMs
Reflexion adds verbal self-critique to the loop
P-233
Source record
Provenance
- Record ID
- P-233
- Record created
- 2026-07-13
- Last reviewed
- 2026-07-14
- Record version
- 2
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.11366
- arXiv:2303.11366
Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.