{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/language-models-are-few-shot-butlers","title":"Language Models are Few-Shot Butlers","arxiv_id":"2104.07972","date":"2021-04-16","proceeding":"EMNLP 2021 11","authors":["Vincent Micheli","François Fleuret"],"abstract":"Pretrained language models demonstrate strong performance in most NLP tasks when fine-tuned on small task-specific datasets. Hence, these autoregressive models constitute ideal agents to operate in text-based environments where language understanding and generative capabilities are essential. Nonetheless, collecting expert demonstrations in such environments is a time-consuming endeavour. We introduce a two-stage procedure to learn from a small set of demonstrations and further improve by interacting with an environment. We show that language models fine-tuned with only 1.2% of the expert demonstrations and a simple reinforcement learning algorithm achieve a 51% absolute improvement in success rate over existing methods in the ALFWorld environment.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.07972v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.07972v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"language-models-are-few-shot-butlers","repo_url":"https://github.com/vmicheli/lm-butlers","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"GPL-3.0"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2104.07972","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2104.07972","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}