{"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-can-self-improve-at-state","title":"Language Models can Self-Improve at State-Value Estimation for Better Search","arxiv_id":"2503.02878","date":"2025-03-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Ethan Mendes","Alan Ritter"],"abstract":"Collecting ground truth task completion rewards or human demonstrations for multi-step reasoning tasks is often cost-prohibitive and time-consuming, especially in interactive domains like web tasks. To address this bottleneck, we present self-taught lookahead, a self-supervised method that leverages state-transition dynamics to train a value model capable of effectively guiding language model-controlled search. We find that moderately sized (8 billion parameters) open-weight value models improved with self-taught lookahead can match the performance of using a frontier LLM such as gpt-4o as the value model. Furthermore, we find that self-taught lookahead improves performance by 20% while reducing costs 37x compared to previous LLM-based tree search, without relying on ground truth rewards.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02878v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02878v1.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-can-self-improve-at-state","repo_url":"https://github.com/ethanm88/self-taught-lookahead","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2503.02878","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2503.02878","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}