Agents & Tool Use · 2023

Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Noah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Edward Berman, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan, Shunyu Yao

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

Descendants

Source record

Provenance

Record ID
P-233
Record created
2026-07-13
Last reviewed
2026-07-14
Record version
2

Citation caveat: Citation metadata is approximate and marked unverified in the source dataset.