CodeIt: Self-Improving Language Models with Prioritized Hindsight Replay
Authors: name: Natasha Butt; name: Blazej Manczak; name: Auke Wiggers; name: Corrado Rainone; name: David Zhang; name: Michaël Defferrard; name: Taco Cohen
Published: 2024-02-07 13:55:27

Abstract: Large language models are increasingly solving tasks that are commonly
believed to require human-level reasoning ability. However, these models still
perform very poorly on benchmarks of general intelligence such as the
Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). In this paper, we approach ARC as a
programming-by-examples problem, and introduce a novel and scalable method for
language model self-improvement called Code Iteration (CodeIt). Our method
iterates between 1) program sampling and hindsight relabeling, and 2) learning
from prioritized experience replay. By relabeling the goal of an episode (i.e.,
the target program output given input) to the realized output produced by the
sampled program, our method effectively deals with the extreme sparsity of
rewards in program synthesis. Applying CodeIt to the ARC dataset, we
demonstrate that prioritized hindsight replay, along with pre-training and
data-augmentation, leads to successful inter-task generalization. CodeIt is the
first neuro-symbolic approach that scales to the full ARC evaluation dataset.
Our method solves 15% of ARC evaluation tasks, achieving state-of-the-art
performance and outperforming existing neural and symbolic baselines.