Reflexion: Language Agents with

Verbal Reinforcement Learning

Noah Shinn Federico Cassano

Northeastern University Northeastern University
noahshinn024@gmail.com cassano.f@northeastern.edu
arXiv:2303.11366v3 [cs.AI] 10 Jun 2023

Beck Labash Ashwin Gopinath

Northeastern University Massachusetts Institute of Technology
labash.b@northeastern.edu agopi@mit.edu

Karthik Narasimhan Shunyu Yao

Princeton University Princeton University
karthikn@princeton.edu shunyuy@princeton.edu

Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly used to interact with exter-
nal environments (e.g., games, compilers, APIs) as goal-driven agents. However,
it remains challenging for these language agents to quickly and efficiently learn
from trial-and-error as traditional reinforcement learning methods require exten-
sive training samples and expensive model fine-tuning. We propose Reflexion, a
novel framework to reinforce language agents not by updating weights, but in-
stead through linguistic feedback. Concretely, Reflexion agents verbally reflect
on task feedback signals, then maintain their own reflective text in an episodic
memory buffer to induce better decision-making in subsequent trials. Reflexion is
flexible enough to incorporate various types (scalar values or free-form language)
and sources (external or internally simulated) of feedback signals, and obtains
significant improvements over a baseline agent across diverse tasks (sequential
decision-making, coding, language reasoning). For example, Reflexion achieves
a 91% pass@1 accuracy on the HumanEval coding benchmark, surpassing the
previous state-of-the-art GPT-4 that achieves 80%. We also conduct ablation and
analysis studies using different feedback signals, feedback incorporation methods,
and agent types, and provide insights into how they affect performance.

1 Introduction
Recent works such as ReAct [32], SayCan [1], Toolformer [22], HuggingGPT [23], generative
agents [19], and WebGPT [17] have demonstrated the feasibility of autonomous decision-making
agents that are built on top of a large language model (LLM) core. These methods use LLMs to
generate text and ‘actions‘ that can be used in API calls and executed in an environment. Since
they rely on massive models with an enormous number of parameters, such approaches have been
so far limited to using in-context examples as a way of teaching the agents, since more traditional
optimization schemes like reinforcement learning with gradient descent require substantial amounts
of compute and time.
In this paper, we propose an alternative approach called Reflexion that uses verbal reinforcement
to help agents learn from prior failings. Reflexion converts binary or scalar feedback from the

Preprint. Under review.

environment into verbal feedback in the form of a textual summary, which is then added as additional
context for the LLM agent in the next episode. This self-reflective feedback acts as a ‘semantic’
gradient signal by providing the agent with a concrete direction to improve upon, helping it learn
from prior mistakes to perform better on the task. This is akin to how humans iteratively learn to
accomplish complex tasks in a few-shot manner – by reflecting on their previous failures in order to
form an improved plan of attack for the next attempt. For example, in figure 1, a Reflexion agent
learns to optimize its own behavior to solve decision-making, programming, and reasoning tasks
through trial, error, and self-reflection.
Generating useful reflective feedback is challenging since it requires a good understanding of where
the model made mistakes (i.e. the credit assignment problem [25]) as well as the ability to generate
a summary containing actionable insights for improvement. We explore three ways for doing
this – simple binary environment feedback, pre-defined heuristics for common failure cases, and
self-evaluation such as binary classification using LLMs (decision-making) or self-written unit
tests (programming). In all implementations, the evaluation signal is amplified to natural language
experience summaries which can be stored in long-term memory.
Reflexion has several advantages compared to more traditional RL approaches like policy or value-
based learning: 1) it is lightweight and doesn’t require finetuning the LLM, 2) it allows for more
nuanced forms of feedback (e.g. targeted changes in actions), compared to scalar or vector rewards
that are challenging to perform accurate credit assignment with, 3) it allows for a more explicit and
interpretable form of episodic memory over prior experiences, and 4) it provides more explicit hints
for actions in future episodes. At the same time, it does have the disadvantages of relying on the
power of the LLM’s self-evaluation capabilities (or heuristics) and not having a formal guarantee for
success. However, as LLM capabilities improve, we only expect this paradigm to get better over time.
We perform experiments on (1) decision-making tasks to test sequential action choices over long
trajectories, (2) reasoning tasks to test knowledge-intensive, single-step generation improvement,
and (3) programming tasks to teach the agent to effectively use external tools such as compilers
and interpreters. Across all three types of tasks, we observe Reflexion agents are better decision-
makers, reasoners, and programmers. More concretely, Reflexion agents improve on decision-making
AlfWorld [24] tasks over strong baseline approaches by an absolute 22% in 12 iterative learning
steps, and on reasoning questions in HotPotQA [30] by 20%, and Python programming tasks on
HumanEval [5] by as much as 11%.
To summarize, our contributions are the following:

• We propose Reflexion, a new paradigm for ‘verbal‘ reinforcement that parameterizes a

policy as an agent’s memory encoding paired with a choice of LLM parameters.
• We explore this emergent property of self-reflection in LLMs and empirically show that
self-reflection is extremely useful to learn complex tasks over a handful of trials.
• We introduce LeetcodeHardGym, a code-generation RL gym environment consisting of 40
challenging Leetcode questions (‘hard-level‘) in 19 programming languages.
• We show that Reflexion achieves improvements over strong baselines across several tasks,
and achieves state-of-the-art results on various code generation benchmarks.

2 Related work
Reasoning and decision-making Self-Refine [14] employs an iterative framework for self-
refinement to autonomously improve generation through self-evaluation. These self-evaluation
and self-improvement steps are conditioned on given task constraints, such as "How can this genera-
tion be written in a more positive way". Self-Refine is effective but is limited to single-generation
reasoning tasks. Pryzant et al. [21] performs a similar semantic prompt-writing optimization, but is
also limited to single-generation tasks. Paul et al. [20] fine-tune critic models to provide intermediate
feedback within trajectories to improve reasoning responses. Xie et al. [29] use stochastic beam
search over actions to perform a more efficient decision-making search strategy which allows the
agent to use foresight advantage due to its self-evaluation component. Yoran et al. [33] and Nair et al.
[16] use decider models to reason over several generations. Kim et al. [9] use a retry pattern over
a fixed number of steps without an evaluation step. Goodman [8] perform a qualitative evaluation

2
 Figure 1: Reflexion works on decision-making 4.1, programming 4.3, and reasoning 4.2 tasks.

Related work on reasoning and decision-making

Approach Self Hidden Decision Binary Memory
refine constraints making reward
Self-refine [14] ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗ ✗
Beam search [29] ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✗
Reflexion (ours) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
Related work on programming
Approach Test Debugging Self-generated Multiple Self-reflection
Test execution execution tests languages
AlphaCode [13] ✓ ✗ ✗ ✓ ✗
CodeT [4] ✓ ✗ ✓ ✗ ✗
Self-debugging [6] ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗
CodeRL [12] ✓ ✓ ✗ ✗ ✗
Reflexion (ours) ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓

step that proposes optimizations to the previous generation. In this paper, we show that several of
these concepts can be enhanced with self-reflection to build a persisting memory of self-reflective
experiences which allows an agent to identify its own errors and self-suggest lessons to learn from its
mistakes over time.

Programming Several past and recent works employ variations of test-driven development or
code debugging practices. AlphaCode [13] evaluates a set of generations on hidden test cases.
CodeT [4] uses self-generated unit tests that are used to score generated function implementations.
Self-Debugging [6] employs a debugging component that is used to improve existing implementations
given feedback from a code execution environment. CodeRL [12] sets the problem in an RL frame-
work using an actor-critic setup to debug programs given feedback from an execution environment.
AlphaCode, Self-Debugging and CodeRL are effective in fixing less-complex program bugs, but they
rely upon ground truth test cases that invalidate pass@1 eligibility, and do not use self-reflection to
bridge the gap between error identification and implementation improvement. CodeT does not access
hidden test cases but does not implement a self-learning step to improve code writing.

Self-reflection Several recent works recognize new cognitive abilities exhibited by LLMs that
were previously considered unique to humans. Kosinski [10] show notable performance on theory
of mind (ToM) tasks at the level of young to middle-aged human children. However, Ullman [26]
argue that ToM task completion accuracy is highly dependent on specific setup and will fail to
complete trivial variations to the original problem. Moghaddam and Honey [15] show that ToM task
accuracy can be improved using better prompting strategies. Wei et al. [27] introduce the concept of
emergent properties in LLMs and discuss scaling predictions for future models. To the best of our
knowledge, our work is the first to utilize self-reflection for practical use in autonomous behavior in
language agents for reasoning, decision-making, and programming tasks. Empirically, we show that
self-reflection steps are crucial to amplifying sparse feedback for iterative learning.

3
 Algorithm 1 Reinforcement via self-reflection
Agent
Initialize Actor, Evaluator, Self-Reflection:
External feedback Ma , Me , Msr
Self-reflection (LM) Initialize policy πθ (ai |si ), θ = {Ma , mem}
Internal Reflective
feedback text Generate initial trajectory using πθ
Evaluate τ0 using Me
Evaluator (LM) Experience Generate initial self-reflection sr0 using Msr
(long-term memory)
Set mem ← [sr0 ]
Trajectory
Set t = 0
Actor (LM) while Me not pass or t < max trials do
(short-term memory)
Generate τt = [a0 , o0 , . . . ai , oi ] using πθ
Evaluate τt using Me
Generate self-reflection srt using Msr
Obs / Reward Environment Action
Append srt to mem
Increment t
end while
return
Figure 2: (a) Diagram of Reflexion. (b) Reflexion reinforcement algorithm

3 Reflexion: reinforcement via verbal reflection

We develop a modular formulation for Reflexion, utilizing three distinct models: an Actor, denoted as
Ma , which generates text and actions; an Evaluator model, represented by Me , that scores the outputs
produced by Ma ; and a Self-Reflection model, denoted as Msr , which generates verbal reinforcement
cues to assist the Actor in self-improvement. We provide a detailed description of each of these
models and subsequently elucidate their collaborative functioning within the Reflexion framework.

Actor The Actor is built upon a large language model (LLM) that is specifically prompted to
generate the necessary text and actions conditioned on the state observations. Analogous to traditional
policy-based RL setups, we sample an action or generation, at , from the current policy πθ at time
t, receive an observation from the environment ot . We explore various Actor models, including
Chain of Thought [28] and ReAct [32]. These diverse generation models allow us to explore different
aspects of text and action generation within the Reflexion framework, providing valuable insights
into their performance and effectiveness. In addition, we also add a memory component mem that
provides additional context to this agent (details on how this is populated are provided below).

Evaluator The Evaluator component of the Reflexion framework plays a crucial role in assessing
the quality of the generated outputs produced by the Actor. It takes as input a generated trajectory
and computes a reward score that reflects its performance within the given task context. Defining
effective value and reward functions that apply to semantic spaces is difficult, so we investigate
several variants of the Evaluator model. For reasoning tasks, we explore reward functions based
on exact match (EM) grading, ensuring that the generated output aligns closely with the expected
solution. In decision-making tasks, we employ pre-defined heuristic functions that are tailored to
specific evaluation criteria. Additionally, we experiment with using a different instantiation of an
LLM itself as an Evaluator, generating rewards for decision-making and programming tasks. This
multi-faceted approach to Evaluator design allows us to examine different strategies for scoring
generated outputs, offering insights into their effectiveness and suitability across a range of tasks.

Self-reflection The Self-Reflection model instantiated as an LLM, plays a crucial role in the
Reflexion framework by generating verbal self-reflections to provide valuable feedback for future
trials. Given a sparse reward signal, such as a binary success status (success/fail), the current trajectory,
and its persistent memory mem, the self-reflection model generates nuanced and specific feedback.
This feedback, which is more informative than scalar rewards, is then stored in the agent’s memory
(mem). For instance, in a multi-step decision-making task, when the agent receives a failure signal, it
can infer that a specific action ai led to subsequent incorrect actions ai+1 and ai+2 . The agent can
then verbally state that it should have taken a different action, a′i , which would have resulted in a′i+1

4
and a′i+2 , and store this experience in its memory. In subsequent trials, the agent can leverage its past
experiences to adapt its decision-making approach at time t by choosing action a′i . This iterative
process of trial, error, self-reflection, and persisting memory enables the agent to rapidly improve its
decision-making ability in various environments by utilizing informative feedback signals.

Memory Core components of the Reflexion process are the notion of short-term and long-term
memory. At inference time, the Actor conditions its decisions on short and long-term memory, similar
to the way that humans remember fine-grain recent details while also recalling distilled important
experiences from long-term memory. In the RL setup, the trajectory history serves as the short-term
memory while outputs from the Self-Reflection model are stored in long-term memory. These two
memory components work together to provide context that is specific but also influenced by lessons
learned over several trials, which is a key advantage of Reflexion agents over other LLM action
choice works.

The Reflexion process Reflexion is formalized as an iterative optimization process in 1. In the

first trial, the Actor produces a trajectory τ0 by interacting with the environment. The Evaluator then
produces a score r0 which is computed as rt = Me (τ0 ). rt is only a scalar reward for trial t that
improves as task-specific performance increases. After the first trial, to amplify r0 to a feedback form
that can be used for improvement by an LLM, the Self-Reflection model analyzes the set of {τ0 , r0 }
to produce a summary sr0 which is stored in the memory mem. srt is a verbal experience feedback
for trial t. The Actor, Evaluator, and Self-Reflection models work together through trials in a loop
until the Evaluator deems τt to be correct. As mentioned in 3, the memory component of Reflexion
is crucial to its effectiveness. After each trial t, srt , is appended mem. In practice, we bound mem
by a maximum number of stored experiences, Ω (usually set to 1-3) to adhere to max context LLM
limitations.

4 Experiments

We evaluate various natural language RL setups on decision-making, reasoning, and code generation
tasks. Specifically, we challenge an agent to perform search-based question answering on HotPotQA
[30], multi-step tasks in common household environments in AlfWorld [24], and code writing tasks
in competition-like environments with interpreters and compilers in HumanEval [5], MBPP [2],
and LeetcodeHard, a new benchmark. Most notably, Reflexion improves performance over strong
baselines by 22% in AlfWorld, 20% in HotPotQA, and 11% on HumanEval.

4.1 Sequential decision making: ALFWorld

AlfWorld is a suite of text-based environments that challenge an agent to solve multi-step tasks
in a variety of interactive environments based on TextWorld [7]. Following Yao et al. [32], we
run the agent in 134 AlfWorld environments across six different tasks, including finding hidden
objects (e.g., finding a spatula in a drawer), moving objects (e.g., moving a knife to the cutting
board), and manipulating objects with other objects (e.g., chilling a tomato in the fridge). We use
ReAct [32] as the action generator as Yao et al. [32] has shown success in long trajectory decision-
making using explicit intermediate thoughts. AlfWorld tasks naturally require a self-evaluation step
as the environment can only signal if a task is complete. To achieve fully autonomous behavior,
we implement two self-evaluation techniques: natural language classification using an LLM and a
hand-written heuristic. The heuristic is simple: if the agent executes the same action and receives the
same response for more than 3 cycles, or if the number of actions taken in the current environment
exceeds 30 (inefficient planning), we self-reflect. In the baseline runs, if self-reflection is suggested,
we skip the self-reflection process, reset the environment, and start a new trial. In the Reflexion runs,
the agent uses self-reflection to find its mistake, update its memory, reset the environment, and start a
new trial. To avoid very long prompt windows that may exceed the maximum limit, we truncate the
agent’s memory to the last 3 self-reflections (experiences).
To avoid syntactic errors, we provide two domain-specific few-shot trajectories to the agent. We use
the same few-shot trajectory examples as Yao et al. [32] with GPT-3 for the LLM. AlfWorld tasks,
ReAct few-shot prompts, and Reflexion examples are included in the appendix.

5
 1.0 (a) ALFWorld Success Rate 0.5 (a) ALFWorld Success Rate
ReAct only ReAct only - hallucination

Proportion of Solved Environments

ReAct + Reflexion (Heuristic) ReAct only - inefficient planning
ReAct + Reflexion (GPT) ReAct + Reflexion - hallucination
0.9 0.4

Proportion of Environments
ReAct + Reflexion - inefficient planning

0.8 0.3

0.7 0.2

0.6 0.1

0.5 0 2 4 6 8 10 0.0 0 2 4 6 8 10
Trial Number Trial Number
Figure 3: (a) AlfWorld performance across 134 tasks showing cumulative proportions of solved tasks
using self-evaluation techniques of (Heuristic) and (GPT) for binary classification. (b) Classification
of AlfWorld trajectories by reason of failure.

Results ReAct + Reflexion significantly outperforms ReAct by completing 130 out of 134 tasks
using the simple heuristic to detect hallucinations and inefficient planning. Further, ReAct + Reflexion
learns to solve additional tasks by learning in 12 consecutive trials. In the ReAct-only approach, we
see that performance increase halts between trials 6 and 7.

Analysis A common error in baseline failed AlfWorld trajectories is when an agent thinks that it
has possession of an item but does not actually have the item. The agent proceeds to execute several
actions in a long trajectory and is not able to backtrack its actions to find the mistake. Reflexion
eliminates almost all of these cases by using self-reflection to distill long, failed trajectories into
relevant experiences that can are used as "self-hints" in the future. There are two main cases in which
long-term memory helps an agent in AlfWorld: 1) An early mistake in a long trajectory can be easily
identified. The agent can suggest a new action choice or even a new long-term plan. 2) There are too
many surfaces/containers to check for an item. The agent can exploit its experience memory over
several trials to thoroughly search a room. In 3, the learning curve suggests that the learning process
occurs over several experiences, meaning that the agent is successfully balancing cases 1 and 2 shown
in the immediate spike in the improvement between the first two trials, then a steady increase over
the next 11 trials to a near-perfect performance. On the other hand, 3 shows a ReAct-only agent
converging at a hallucination rate of 22% with no signs of long-term recovery.

4.2 Reasoning: HotpotQA

HotPotQA [30] is a Wikipedia-based dataset with 113k question-and-answer pairs that challenge
agents to parse content and reason over several supporting documents. To test improvement in
reasoning only ability, we implement Reflexion + Chain-of-Thought (CoT) [28] for step-by-step
Q → A and Q, Cgt → A implementations, where Q is the question, Cgt is the ground truth context
from the dataset, and A is the final answer. Since CoT is not a multi-step decision-making technique,
we give Cgt to the agent so that we can isolate the reasoning behavior over large sections of the
provided text. To test holistic question and answering ability, which requires reasoning and action
choice, we implement a Reflexion + ReAct [32] agent that can retrieve relevant context using a
Wikipedia API and infer answers using step-by-step explicit thinking. For CoT implementations, we
use 6-shot prompting; for ReAct, we use 2-shot prompting, and for self-reflection, we use 2-shot
prompting. All examples can be found in the appendix.
Robustly evaluating natural language answers is a long-standing problem in NLP. Therefore, between
trials, we use exact match answer grading using the environment to give a binary success signal to
the agent. After each trial, the self-reflection loop is employed to amplify the binary signal, similar to
the decision-making setup 4.1 in AlfWorld with a memory size of 3 experiences.

6
 0.8 (a) HotPotQA Success Rate 1.0 (b) HotPotQA CoT (GT) (c) HotPotQA Episodic Memory

Proportion of Solved Tasks

Proportion of Solved Tasks
CoT (GT) only 1.0

Proportion of Solved Tasks

CoT only
ReAct only CoT (GT) + Reflexion CoT (GT) only
0.8 0.9 CoT (GT) EPM
0.6 CoT + Reflexion CoT (GT) EPM + Reflexion
ReAct + Reflexion
0.8
0.4 0.6 0.7
0.2 0.4 0.6
0 2 4 6 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 0.5 0 1 2 3 4
Trial Number Trial Number Trial Number
Figure 4: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and ReAct. Reflexion improves search, information retrieval,
and reasoning capabilities on 100 HotPotQA questions. (a) Reflexion ReAct vs Reflexion CoT (b)
Reflexion CoT (GT) for reasoning only (c) Reflexion vs episodic memory ablation.

Results Reflexion outperforms all baseline approaches by significant margins over several learning
steps. Furthermore, ReAct-only, CoT-only, and CoT (GT)-only implementations fail to probabilisti-
cally improve on any tasks, meaning that no failed tasks from the first trial from any of the baseline
approaches were able to be solved in subsequent trials using a temperature of 0.7 In the Reflexion runs,
we allowed the agent to gather experience and retry on failed tasks until it produced 3 consecutive
failed attempts on the particular task. Naturally, the CoT (GT) achieved higher accuracy scores as it
was given access to the ground truth context of the question. Still, the CoT (GT) agent is unable to
correctly infer the correct answer for 39% of the questions, but Reflexion helps the agent to correct
its mistakes without access to the ground truth answer to improve its accuracy by 14%.

Analysis We perform an ablation experiment to isolate the advantage of the self-reflective step for
reasoning using CoT (GT) as the baseline approach 4. Recall that CoT (GT) uses Chain-of-Thought
reasoning with provided ground truth context, which tests reasoning ability over long contexts. Next,
we add an element of episodic memory (EPM) by including the most recent trajectory. For the
Reflexion agent, we implement the standard self-reflection step as a final pass. Intuitively, we test if
the agent is iteratively learning more effectively by using verbal explanation using language written
in the first person. 4 shows that self-reflection improves learning by an 8% absolute boost over
the episodic memory learning advantage. This result supports the argument that refinement-only
approaches are not as effective as self-reflection-guided refinement approaches.

4.3 Programming

We evaluate the baseline and Reflexion approaches on Python and Rust code writing on MBPP
[2], HumanEval [5], and LeetcodeHardGym, our new dataset. MBPP and HumanEval measure
function body generation accuracy given natural language descriptions. We use a benchmark language
compiler, MultiPL-E [3], to translate subsets of HumanEval and MBPP to the Rust language. MultiPL-
E is a collection of small compilers that can be used to translate Python benchmark questions to 18
other languages. We include experiments for Rust code generation to demonstrate that Reflexion
implementations for code generation are language-agnostic and can be used for interpreted and
compiled languages. Lastly, we introduce a new benchmark, LeetcodeHardGym, which is an
interactive programming gym that contains 40 Leetcode hard-rated questions that have been released
after October 8, 2022, which is the pre-training cutoff date of GPT-4 [18].
The task of programming presents a unique opportunity to use more grounded self-evaluation practices
such as self-generated unit test suites. Thus, our Reflexion-based programming task implementation is
eligible for pass@1 accuracy reporting. To generate a test suite, we use Chain-of-Thought prompting
[28] to produce diverse, extensive tests with corresponding natural language descriptions. Then, we
filter for syntactically valid test statements by attempting to construct a valid abstract syntax tree
(AST) for each proposed test. Finally, we sample n tests from the collection of generated unit tests
to produce a test suite T , denoted as {t0 , t1 , . . . , tn }. We set n to a maximum of 6 unit tests. Aside
from the unit test suite component, the setup for the learning loop for a Reflexion programming agent
is identical to the reasoning and decision-making agents with a max memory limit of 1 experience.
Results Reflexion outperforms all baseline accuracies and sets new state-of-the-art standards on
all benchmarks for Python and Rust except for MBPP Python 1. We further investigate the inferior
performance of Reflexion on MBPP Python.

7
 Benchmark + Language Prev SOTA Pass@1 SOTA Pass@1 Reflexion Pass@1
HumanEval (PY) 65.8 (CodeT [4] + GPT-3.5) 80.1 (GPT-4) 91.0
HumanEval (RS) – 60.0 (GPT-4) 68.0
MBPP (PY) 67.7 (CodeT [4] + Codex [5]) 80.1 (GPT-4) 77.1
MBPP (RS) – 70.9 (GPT-4) 75.4
Leetcode Hard (PY) – 7.5 (GPT-4) 15.0
Table 1: Pass@1 accuracy for various model-strategy-language combinations. The base strategy is a
single code generation sample. All instruction-based models follow zero-shot code generation.

Benchmark + Language Base Reflexion TP FN FP TN

HumanEval (PY) 0.80 0.91 0.99 0.40 0.01 0.60
MBPP (PY) 0.80 0.77 0.84 0.59 0.16 0.41
HumanEval (RS) 0.60 0.68 0.87 0.37 0.13 0.63
MBPP (RS) 0.71 0.75 0.84 0.51 0.16 0.49
Table 2: Overall accuracy and test generation performance for HumanEval and MBPP. For Rust,
HumanEval is the hardest 50 problems from HumanEval Python translated to Rust with MultiPL-E
[3]. TP: unit tests pass, solution pass; FN: unit tests fail, solution pass; FP: unit tests pass, solution
fail; TN: unit tests fail, solution fail.

Analysis We acknowledge that self-reflecting code-generation agents are bound to their ability to
write diverse, comprehensive tests. Therefore, in the case in which the model generates a flaky test
suite, it is possible that all tests pass on an incorrect solution and lead to a false positive label on a
code completion [11]. On the other hand, if the model produces an incorrectly written test suite, it
is possible for some of the tests to fail on a correct solution, leading to a self-reflection generation
that is conditioned on a false negative code completion. Given the implementation of Reflexion,
false negatives are preferred over false positives as the agent may be able to use self-reflection to
identify the incorrect test(s) and prompt itself to keep the original code completion intact. On the
other hand, if an invalid test suite returns a false positive completion (all internal test cases pass
but the implementation is incorrect), the agent will prematurely report an invalid submission. In 2,
various conditions are measured to analyze performance beyond pass@1 accuracy. Previously, we
displayed the inferior performance of Reflexion to the baseline GPT-4 on MBPP Python. In 2, we
observe a notable discrepancy between the false positive labels produced by internal test execution,
P(not pass@1 generation correct | tests pass). That is, the probability that a submission will fail given
that it passes all unit tests. For HumanEval and MBPP Python, the baseline pass@1 accuracies are
relatively similar, 82% and 80%, respectively. However, the false positive test execution rate for
MBPP Python is 16.3% while the rate for HumanEval Python is a mere 1.4%, leading to 91% overall
accuracy 1.

Approach Test Generation Self-reflection Pass@1 (Acc)

Base model False False 0.60
Test generation omission False True 0.52
Self-reflection omission True False 0.60
Reflexion True True 0.68
Table 3: Pass@1 accuracy for various compromised approaches on the Reflexion approach using
GPT-4 as the base model on HumanEval Rust - 50 hardest problems

Ablation study We test the composite approach of Reflexion for test generation and self-reflection
cooperation on a subset of the 50 hardest HumanEval Rust problems. Our Rust compiler environment
provides verbose error logs and helpful debugging hints, therefore serving as a good playground
for compromised approaches. First, we omit internal test generation and execution steps, which
test the agent to self-reflect without guidance from current implementations. 3 shows an inferior
52% vs 60% (baseline) accuracy, which suggests that the agent is unable to determine if the current

8
implementation is correct without unit tests. Therefore, the agent must participate in all iterations of
the run without the option to return early, performing harmful edits to the implementation.
Next, we test self-reflection contribution by omitting the natural language explanation step following
failed unit test suite evaluations. Intuitively, this challenges the agent to combine the tasks of
error identification and implementation improvement across all failed unit tests. Interestingly, the
compromised agent does not improve performance over the baseline run. We observe that the test
generation and code compilation steps are able to catch syntax and logic errors, but the implementation
fixes do not reflect these indications. These empirical results suggest that several recent works that
propose blind trial and error debugging techniques without self-reflection are ineffective on harder
tasks such as writing complex programs in Rust.

5 Limitations
At its core, Reflexion is an optimization technique that uses natural language to do policy optimization.
Policy optimization is a powerful approach to improve action choice through experience, but it may
still succumb to non-optimal local minima solutions. In this study, we limit long-term memory to
a sliding window with maximum capacity, but we encourage future work to extend the memory
component of Reflexion with more advanced structures such as vector embedding databases or
traditional SQL databases. Specific to code generation, there are many practical limitations to test-
driven development in specifying accurate input-output mappings such as non-deterministic generator
functions, impure functions that interact with APIs, functions that vary output according to hardware
specifications, or functions that invoke parallel or concurrent behavior that may be difficult to predict.

6 Broader impact
Large language models are increasingly used to interact with external environments (e.g. the Internet,
software, robotics, etc.) and humans. Our work has the potential of reinforcing and empowering
these agents toward greater automation and work efficiency, but it also amplifies the risks when these
agents were put into misuse. We believe that this direction of research will need more effort in safety
and ethical considerations.
On the other hand, reinforcement learning has suffered from its black-box policy and optimiza-
tion setups in which interpretability and alignment have been challenging. Our proposed “verbal”
reinforcement learning might address some of the issues and turn autonomous agents more inter-
pretable and diagnosable. For example, in the case of tool-usage that may be too hard for humans to
understand, self-reflections could be monitored to ensure proper intent before using the tool.

7 Conclusion
In this work, we present Reflexion, an approach that leverages verbal reinforcement to teach agents
to learn from past mistakes. We empirically show that Reflexion agents significantly outperform
currently widely-used decision-making approaches by utilizing self-reflection. In future work,
Reflexion could be used to employ more advanced techniques that have been thoroughly studied in
traditional RL settings, such as value learning in natural language or off-policy exploration techniques.

8 Reproducibility
We highly advise others to use isolated execution environments when running autonomous code
writing experiments as the generated code is not validated before execution.

9
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11
A Additional Information and Examples

B Decision-making

Environment: You are in the middle of a room. Looking quickly around you, you see a bed 1, a desk
2, a desk 1, a drawer 6, a drawer 5, a drawer 4, a drawer 3, a drawer 2, a drawer 1, a garbagecan 1, a
laundryhamper 1, a safe 1, a shelf 6, a shelf 5, a shelf 4, a shelf 3, a shelf 2, and a shelf 1.
Task: examine the mug with the desklamp.
Trial #1
> think: To solve the task, I need to find and take a mug, then find and use a desklamp.
> think: First I need to find a mug. A mug is more likely to appear in drawer (1-6), desk (1-2), shelf
(1-6), garbagecan (1), laundryhamper (1). I can check one by one, starting with drawer 1.
> go to drawer 1
The drawer 1 is closed.
...
> open drawer 6
You open the drawer 6. The drawer 6 is open. In it, you see a keychain 2.
> go to desk 1
On the desk 1, you see a creditcard 3, a desklamp 1, a laptop 2, a mug 1, a pen 1, and a pencil 1.
> think: Now I find a mug (1). Next, I need to take it.
> take mug 1 from desk 1
You pick up the mug 1 from the desk 1.
> think: Now I take a mug (1). Next, I need to find a desklamp. A desklamp is more likely to appear
in desk (1-2), sidetable (1-2), shelf (1-6), bed (1), drawer (1-6). I can check one by one, starting with
desk 1.
> go to desk 1
Nothing happens.
> go to desk 2
On the desk 2, you see a alarmclock 1, a bowl 1, a mug 3, a pencil 3, and a pencil 2.
> think: Now I find a desklamp (1). Next, I need to use it.
> use desklamp 1
Nothing happens.
> use desklamp 1
Nothing happens.
Status: Fail
Reflection: In this environment, my plan was to find a mug then find and use a desklamp. However,
the task says to examine the mug with the desklamp. I should have looked for the desklamp first, then
looked for the mug. I noticed that the desklamp was found on desk 1. In the next trial, I will go to
desk 1, find the lamp, then look for the mug and examine it with the desklamp.
Trial #2
> go to desk 1
On the desk 1, you see a creditcard 3, a desklamp 1, a laptop 2, a mug 1, a pen 1, and a pencil 1.
> think: To solve the task, I need to find and take a mug, then find and use a desklamp.
> take mug 1 from desk 1
You pick up the mug 1 from the desk 1.
> think: To solve the task, I need to find and take a mug, then find and use a desklamp.
> use desklamp 1
You turn on the desklamp 1.
Status: Success
Figure 5: [Top] An AlfWorld trajectory in which the agent failed due to inefficient planning. In the
reflection, the agent recognizes that it should have looked for the desklamp then the mug, not the mug
then the desklamp. [Bottom] The agent is able to correct its reasoning trace and execute a sequence
of actions in a concise manner.

12
 B.1 WebShop Limitation

In 5, we briefly state that Reflexion struggles to overcome local minima choices that require extremely
creative behavior to escape. We observe this shortcoming in an experiment on WebShop [31].
WebShop is a web-based problem-solving benchmark that tests agents to navigate an e-commerce
website to locate and purchase products given requests from clients. We test a two-shot ReAct +
Reflexion agent in 100 environments. However, after only four trials, we terminate the runs as the
agent does not show signs of improvement 6. Further, the agent does not generate helpful, intuitive
self-reflections after failed attempts. We conclude that Reflexion is unable to solve tasks that require
a significant amount of diversity and exploration. In AlfWorld, the agent is able to adequately explore
new environments because the permissible actions can be seen in the observations. In HotPotQA,
the agent faces a similar WebShop search query task but is more successful as the search space for
Wikipedia articles is more diverse and requires less precise search queries. A common problem for
e-commerce search engines is properly handling ambiguity in natural language search interpretations.
Thus, WebShop presents a task that requires very diverse and unique behavior from a Reflexion agent.

0.50 WebShop Success Rate

ReAct only
Proportion of Solved Environments

0.45 ReAct + Reflexion

0.40
0.35
0.30
0.25
0.20
0.15
0.10 0.0 0.5 1.0 1.5 2.0 2.5 3.0
Trial Number
Figure 6: Reflexion vs React performance on WebShop across 100 customer shopping requests.
ReAct + Reflexion fails to significantly outperform ReAct.

C Programming
Programming LLM calls require strict instructions to produce function bodies only, due to the
extensive dialogue training of the LLMs. A few programming examples are reported below with
instructions highlighted in blue and templates. See the full implementation at https://github.
com/noahshinn024/reflexion.

C.1 Programming function implementation example (HumanEval Python)

Sample function signature:

1 def minSubArraySum ( nums ) :

2 """
3 Given an array of integers nums , find the minimum sum of
any
4 non - empty sub - array of nums .
5 Example
6 minSubArraySum ([2 , 3 , 4 , 1 , 2 , 4]) == 1

13
7 minSubArraySum ([ -1 , -2 , -3]) == -6
8 """

Sample function body implementation:

1 min_sum = float ( ’ inf ’)

2 for i in range ( len ( nums ) ) :
3 current_sum = 0
4 for j in range (i , len ( nums ) ) :
5 current_sum += nums [ j ]
6 if current_sum < min_sum :
7 min_sum = current_sum
8 return min_sum

C.2 Reflexion Actor instruction

You are a Python writing assistant. You will be given your previous implementation of a function,
a series of unit tests results, and your self-reflection on your previous implementation. Apply the
necessary changes below by responding only with the improved body of the function. Do not include
the signature in your response. The first line of your response should have 4 spaces of indentation so
that it fits syntactically with the user provided signature. You will be given a few examples by the
user.
Reflexion Actor generations follow the form:
(Instruction)
(Function implementation)
(Unit test feedback)
(Self-reflection)
(Instruction for next function implmentation)
Full examples are shown in https://github.com/noahshinn024/reflexion

C.3 Reflexion Self-reflection instruction and example

You are a Python writing assistant. You will be given your previous implementation of a function,
a series of unit tests results, and your self-reflection on your previous implementation. Apply the
necessary changes below by responding only with the improved body of the function. Do not include
the signature in your response. The first line of your response should have 4 spaces of indentation so
that it fits syntactically with the user provided signature. You will be given a few examples by the
user. Reflexion Self-Reflection generations follow the form:
(Instruction)
(Function implementation)
(Unit test feedback)

C.4 Reflexion programming no Self-Reflection ablation example

Reflexion no Self-Reflection ablation Actor generations follow the form:

(Instruction)
(Function implementation)
(Unit test feedback)
(Self-reflection)
(Instruction for next function implmentation)

C.5 Reflexion programming no test generation ablation example

Reflexion no test generation ablation Actor generations follow the form:

(Instruction)

14
(Function implementation)
(Unit test feedback)
(Self-reflection)
(Instruction for next function implmentation)

15
D Reasoning

D.1 Full example

Trial #1: Question: Grown-Ups starred the actor Trial #2: Question: Grown-Ups starred the actor
who was best known for which role on "’Allo who was best known for which role on "’Allo
’Allo!"? ’Allo!"?
Thought 1: I need to search Grown-Ups and Thought 1: I need to search the actor who was
"’Allo ’Allo!", find the actor who starred in best known for a role on "’Allo ’Allo!" and find
Grown-Ups, then find the role he was best known out what role they were best known for.
for in "’Allo ’Allo!". Action 1: Search[Grown-Ups]
Action 1: Search[Grown-Ups] Observation 1: Grown-Ups is a 1980 British
Observation 1: Grown-Ups is a 1980 British BBC television film devised and directed by
BBC television film devised and directed by Mike Leigh. It stars Lesley Manville, Philip
Mike Leigh. It stars Lesley Manville, Philip Davis, Brenda Blethyn, Janine Duvitski, Lindsay
Davis, Brenda Blethyn, Janine Duvitski, Lindsay Duncan and Sam Kelly. It was edited by Robin
Duncan and Sam Kelly. It was edited by Robin Sales and produced by Louis Marks for the BBC,
Sales and produced by Louis Marks for the BBC, and originally shown on BBC 2 on 28 November
and originally shown on BBC 2 on 28 November 1980.
1980. Thought 2: The paragraph does not mention the
Thought 2: Grown-Ups starred Lesley Manville, actor who was best known for a role on "’Allo
Philip Davis, Brenda Blethyn, Janine Duvitski, ’Allo!". I need to search the actor’s name instead.
Lindsay Duncan and Sam Kelly. I need to search Action 2: Search[Sam Kelly]
"’Allo ’Allo!" and find which actor was best Observation 2: Roger Michael Kelly (19 Decem-
known for which role. ber 1943 – 14 June 2014), known by the stage
Action 2: Search["’Allo ’Allo!"] name Sam Kelly, was an English actor who ap-
Observation 2: Could not find ["’Allo ’Allo!"]. peared in film, television, radio and theatre. He
Similar: ["’Allo ’Allo!", "List of ’Allo ’Allo! is best known for his roles as Captain Hans Geer-
characters", ’Gorden Kaye’, "’Allo ’Allo! (series ing in ’Allo ’Allo!, Warren in Porridge, Sam in
2)", ’Allô, allô’, ’Francesca Gonshaw’, "’Allo On the Up, and Ted Liversidge in Barbara.
’Allo! (series 4)", ’Kim Hartman’, "’Allo ’Allo! Thought 3: Sam Kelly is best known for his role
(series 6)", ’Jeremy Lloyd’] as Captain Hans Geering in "’Allo ’Allo!", so
Thought 3: To find the actor who was best known the answer is Captain Hans Geering.
for which role on "’Allo ’Allo!", I can search Action 3: Finish[Captain Hans Geering]
Gorden Kaye. Observation 3: Answer is CORRECT
Action 3: Search[Gorden Kaye]
Observation 3: Gordon Irving Kaye (7 April
1941 – 23 January 2017), known profession-
ally as Gorden Kaye, was an English actor,
best known for playing womanising café owner
René Artois in the television comedy series ’Allo
’Allo!.
Thought 4: Gorden Kaye was best known for
playing womanising café owner René Artois in
the television comedy series "’Allo ’Allo!". So
the answer is Rene Artois.
Action 4: Finish[Rene Artois]
Observation 4: Answer is INCORRECT
Reflection: I searched the wrong title for the show, "’Allo ’Allo!", which resulted in no results. I
should have searched the show’s main character, Gorden Kaye, to find the role he was best known for
in the show.
Figure 7: Two HotPotQA trials within the same environment and task. The Reflexion + ReAct agent
uses self-reflection to determine a better search method for the next trial.

16
D.2 Chain-of-Thought + Reflexion

Trial #1: Question: What profession does John Trial #2: Question: What profession does John
Lanchester and Alan Dean Foster have in com- Lanchester and Alan Dean Foster have in com-
mon? mon?
Thought 1: Let’s think step by step. John Lanch- Thought 1: Let’s think step by step. John Lanch-
ester is a novelist, journalist, and critic. Alan ester is a novelist, journalist, and financial jour-
Dean Foster is a novelist and screenwriter. So nalist. Alan Dean Foster is a novelist and screen-
the profession John Lanchester and Alan Dean writer. So the profession John Lanchester and
Foster have in common is novelist and screen- Alan Dean Foster have in common is novelist.
writer. Action 1: Finish[novelist]
Action 1: Finish[novelist and screenwriter] Observation 1: Answer is CORRECT
Observation 1: Answer is INCORRECT
Reflection: My reasoning for the profession John Lanchester and Alan Dean Foster have in common
failed because I incorrectly assumed that they both had the same profession. In the future, when
attempting this question, I should focus on better researching the individual backgrounds of both
authors to ensure that I am accurately identifying their professions. Additionally, I should consider
the possibility that they may have multiple professions in common.

D.3 HotPotQA Chain-of-Thought (GT) + Reflexion

Context: The Battle of White Plains was a battle in the New York and New Jersey campaign of the
American Revolutionary War fought on October 28, 1776, near White Plains, New York. Following
the retreat ...
Trial #1: Question: What was a series of battles Trial #2: Question: What was a series of battles
during the Revolutionary War, for control of New during the Revolutionary War, for control of New
York City and the state of New Jersey, fought on York City and the state of New Jersey, fought on
October 28, 1776 near White Plains, New York? October 28, 1776 near White Plains, New York?
Thought 1: The question is asking about a se- Thought 1: The question is asking for a series of
ries of battles during the Revolutionary War for battles during the Revolutionary War, for control
control of New York City and the state of New of New York City and the state of New Jersey,
Jersey, fought on October 28, 1776 near White fought on October 28, 1776 near White Plains,
Plains, New York. From the context, I know that New York. Based on the context, I know that
this was the Battle of White Plains. this series of battles was the New York and New
Action 1: Finish[Battle of White Plains] Jersey campaign.
Observation 1: Answer is INCORRECT Action 1: Finish[The New York and New Jersey
campaign]
Observation 1: Answer is CORRECT
Reflection: Upon reflecting on the incorrect answer I provided, I realize that I may not have provided
enough context to accurately answer the question. The question asked for a series of battles, but I
only provided the name of one battle. To better answer this question in the future, I will make sure to
provide more context, such as the name of the campaign, which was the New York and New Jersey
campaign, and the fact that it was a series of battles. Additionally, I will make sure to include the
dates of the battles, as well as the locations, to ensure that my answer is comprehensive and accurate.

17
D.4 HotPotQA episodic memory (EPM) ablation prompts

D.4.1 (EPM) Chain-of-Thought + Reflexion

Trial #1: Question: Which of Jonny Craig and Trial #2: Question: Which of Jonny Craig and
Pete Doherty has been a member of more bands Pete Doherty has been a member of more bands
? ?
Thought 1: Let’s think step by step. Jonny Thought 1: Let’s think step by step. I will re-
Craig has been a member of six bands, including search the past and current bands of both musi-
Emarosa, Dance Gavin Dance, and Slaves. Pete cians to ensure that I am accurately comparing
Doherty has been a member of seven bands, in- their band memberships. After researching, I
cluding The Libertines, Babyshambles, and The have found that Jonny Craig has been a mem-
Puta Madres. So Pete Doherty has been a mem- ber of seven bands, including Emarosa, Dance
ber of more bands. Gavin Dance, and Slaves. Pete Doherty has been
Action 1: Finish[Pete Doherty] a member of seven bands, including The Lib-
Observation 1: Answer is INCORRECT ertines, Babyshambles, and The Puta Madres. So
Jonny Craig has been a member of more bands.
Action 2: Finish[Jonny Craig]
Observation 2: Answer is CORRECT
Reflection: My reasoning for which musician has been a member of more bands failed because I did
not take into account that Jonny Craig has been a member of more bands in the past, even though Pete
Doherty is currently a member of more bands. In the future, when attempting this question, I should
focus on researching the past and current bands of both musicians to ensure that I am accurately
comparing their band memberships.

D.4.2 (EPM) Chain-of-Thought (GT) + Reflexion

Context: Hari Bahadur Basnet is a Nepalese politician. He is the head of the Foreign Relations
Department of the Rastriya Janashakti Party. Basnet holds a M.Sc. in Engineering.
A Master of Science (Latin: "Magister Scientiae" ; abbreviated MS, M.S., MSc, M.Sc., MSci, M.Sci.,
ScM, Sc.M., SciM or Sci.M.) is a master’s degree in the field of science...
Trial #1: Question: The head of the Foreign Trial #2: Question: The head of the Foreign Re-
Relations Department of the Rastriya Janashakti lations Department of the Rastriya Janashakti
Party holds a degree that can be abbreviated MS, Party holds a degree that can be abbreviated MS,
M.S., or ScM, in what field? M.S., or ScM, in what field?
(Previous trajectory) (Previous trajectory)
Thought 1: The question is asking what field Thought 1: The question is asking what field
of study the head of the Foreign Relations of study the head of the Foreign Relations De-
Department of the Rastriya Janashakti Party partment of the Rastriya Janashakti Party holds
holds a degree in. From the context, I know a degree in. From the context, I know that the
that the degree is a Master of Science degree, degree is a Master of Science degree, which is
which is typically granted for studies in sciences, typically granted for studies in sciences, engi-
engineering, and medicine. neering, and medicine. However, the question
Action 1: Finish[Sciences, Engineering, and is asking for the field of study, not the degree.
Medicine] Based on the context, I know that Hari Bahadur
Observation 1: Answer is INCORRECT Basnet holds a M.Sc. in Engineering.
Action 1: Finish[Engineering]
Observation 1: Answer is CORRECT
Reflection: For the first trial, I misunderstood the question. I thought the question was asking for a
category of degrees, rather than a specific degree. I learned from my mistake and in the second trial, I
focused more closely on the question to understand that it was asking for a specific field of study.

18