Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback

Abstract: Like people, LLMs do not always generate the best text for a given generation problem on their first try (e.g., summaries, answers, explanations). Just as people then refine their text, we introduce SELF-REFINE, a framework for similarly improving initial outputs from LLMs through iterative feedback and refinement. The main idea is to generate an output using an LLM, then allow the same model to provide multi-aspect feedback for its own output; finally, the same model refines its previously generated output given its own feedback. Unlike earlier work, our iterative refinement framework does not require supervised training data or reinforcement learning, and works with a single LLM. We experiment with 7 diverse tasks, ranging from review rewriting to math reasoning, demonstrating that our approach outperforms direct generation. In all tasks, outputs generated with SELF-REFINE are preferred by humans and by automated metrics over those generated directly with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, improving on average by absolute 20% across tasks.