Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback

摘要

Like humans, large language models (LLMs) do not always generate the best output on their first try. Motivated by how humans refine their written text, we introduce Self-Refine, an approach for improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an initial output using an LLM; then, the same LLM provides feedback for its output and uses it to refine itself, iteratively. Self-Refine does not require any supervised training data, additional training, or reinforcement learning, and instead uses a single LLM as the generator, refiner and the feedback provider. We evaluate Self-Refine across 7 diverse tasks, ranging from dialog response generation to mathematical reasoning, using state-of-the-art (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) LLMs. Across all evaluated tasks, outputs generated with Self-Refine are preferred by humans and automatic metrics over those generated with the same LLM using conventional one-step generation, improving by $\sim$ 20% absolute on average in task performance. Our work demonstrates that even state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-4 can be further improved at test-time using our simple, standalone approach.11 1 Code and data at https://selfrefine.info/.