Neha Gupta

Mrinal Rawat, Ambuje Gupta, Rushil Goomer et al.

The ReAct (Reasoning + Action) capability in large language models (LLMs) has become the foundation of modern agentic systems. Recent LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1/o3, exemplify this by emphasizing reasoning through the generation of ample intermediate tokens, which help build a strong premise before producing the final output tokens. In this paper, we introduce Pre-Act, a novel approach that enhances the agent's performance by creating a multi-step execution plan along with the detailed reasoning for the given user input. This plan incrementally incorporates previous steps and tool outputs, refining itself after each step execution until the final response is obtained. Our approach is applicable to both conversational and non-conversational agents. To measure the performance of task-oriented agents comprehensively, we propose a two-level evaluation framework: (1) turn level and (2) end-to-end. Our turn-level evaluation, averaged across five models, shows that our approach, Pre-Act, outperforms ReAct by 70% in Action Recall on the Almita dataset. While this approach is effective for larger models, smaller models crucial for practical applications, where latency and cost are key constraints, often struggle with complex reasoning tasks required for agentic systems. To address this limitation, we fine-tune relatively small models such as Llama 3.1 (8B & 70B) using the proposed Pre-Act approach. Our experiments show that the fine-tuned 70B model outperforms GPT-4, achieving a 69.5% improvement in action accuracy (turn-level) and a 28% improvement in goal completion rate (end-to-end) on the Almita (out-of-domain) dataset.

Guy Blanc, Neha Gupta, Gregory Valiant et al.

We consider networks, trained via stochastic gradient descent to minimize $\ell_2$ loss, with the training labels perturbed by independent noise at each iteration. We characterize the behavior of the training dynamics near any parameter vector that achieves zero training error, in terms of an implicit regularization term corresponding to the sum over the data points, of the squared $\ell_2$ norm of the gradient of the model with respect to the parameter vector, evaluated at each data point. This holds for networks of any connectivity, width, depth, and choice of activation function. We interpret this implicit regularization term for three simple settings: matrix sensing, two layer ReLU networks trained on one-dimensional data, and two layer networks with sigmoid activations trained on a single datapoint. For these settings, we show why this new and general implicit regularization effect drives the networks towards "simple" models.