# ReWOO: Decoupling Reasoning from Observations for Efficient Augmented Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.18323 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18323/

## Key facts

- Cited by 184 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 34 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 May 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 34)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03551/) (2017)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03768/) (2020)
- [Few-Shot Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning is Better and Cheaper than In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.05638/) (2022)
- [Towards a Unified View of Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04366/) (2021)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Instruction Tuning with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.03277/) (2023)
- [Visual ChatGPT: Talking, Drawing and Editing with Visual Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04671/) (2023)
- [PAL: Program-aided Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.10435/) (2022)
- [ChemCrow: Augmenting large-language models with chemistry tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05376/) (2023)
- [MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11381/) (2023)
- [Augmented Language Models: a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.07842/) (2023)
- [Language Models can Solve Computer Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17491/) (2023)
- [Tool Learning with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08354/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17582/) (2023)
- [Draft, Sketch, and Prove: Guiding Formal Theorem Provers with Informal Proofs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.12283/) (2022)
- [Specializing Smaller Language Models towards Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12726/) (2023)
- [ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09014/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 184)

- [A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11432/) (2023)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.06196/) (2024)
- [Cognitive Architectures for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02427/) (2023)
- [RAGEN: Understanding Self-Evolution in LLM Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20073/) (2025)
- [Orca: Progressive Learning from Complex Explanation Traces of GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02707/) (2023)
- [AgentTuning: Enabling Generalized Agent Abilities for LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12823/) (2023)
- [OS-Copilot: Towards Generalist Computer Agents with Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.07456/) (2024)
- [Synapse: Trajectory-as-Exemplar Prompting with Memory for Computer Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07863/) (2023)
- [An LLM Compiler for Parallel Function Calling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04511/) (2023)
- [Text2Reward: Reward Shaping with Language Models for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.11489/) (2023)
- [InfiAgent-DABench: Evaluating Agents on Data Analysis Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05507/) (2024)
- [OpenAgents: An Open Platform for Language Agents in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10634/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models for Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07226/) (2023)
- [AI Agents Under Threat: A Survey of Key Security Challenges and Future Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02630/) (2024)
- [BadAgent: Inserting and Activating Backdoor Attacks in LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03007/) (2024)
- [Agent-FLAN: Designing Data and Methods of Effective Agent Tuning for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12881/) (2024)
- [T-Eval: Evaluating the Tool Utilization Capability of Large Language Models Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14033/) (2023)
- [BOLAA: Benchmarking and Orchestrating LLM-augmented Autonomous Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.05960/) (2023)
- [AutoAct: Automatic Agent Learning from Scratch for QA via Self-Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05268/) (2024)
- [Lemur: Harmonizing Natural Language and Code for Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06830/) (2023)
- [Agent Lumos: Unified and Modular Training for Open-Source Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05657/) (2023)
- [Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11797/) (2023)
- [OfficeBench: Benchmarking Language Agents across Multiple Applications for Office Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19056/) (2024)
- [Benchmarking Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation with Dynamic VQA Dataset and Self-adaptive Planning Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02937/) (2024)
- [Change-Agent: Towards Interactive Comprehensive Remote Sensing Change Interpretation and Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19646/) (2024)
- [AgentBank: Towards Generalized LLM Agents via Fine-Tuning on 50000+ Interaction Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07706/) (2024)
- [AgentLite: A Lightweight Library for Building and Advancing Task-Oriented LLM Agent System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15538/) (2024)
- [Granite-Function Calling Model: Introducing Function Calling Abilities via Multi-task Learning of Granular Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00121/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Agentic Reasoning for Large Language Models: Towards Recursively Self-Improving and Collective Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12538/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Augmented Language Models (ALMs) blend the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with tools that allow for knowledge retrieval and action execution. Existing ALM systems trigger LLM thought processes while pulling observations from these tools in an interleaved fashion. Specifically, an LLM reasons to call an external tool, gets halted to fetch the tool's response, and then decides the next action based on all preceding response tokens. Such a paradigm, though straightforward and easy to implement, often leads to huge computation complexity from redundant prompts and repeated execution. This study addresses such challenges for the first time, proposing a modular paradigm ReWOO (Reasoning WithOut Observation) that detaches the reasoning process from external observations, thus significantly reducing token consumption. Comprehensive evaluations across six public NLP benchmarks and a curated dataset reveal consistent performance enhancements with our proposed methodology. Notably, ReWOO achieves 5x token efficiency and 4% accuracy improvement on HotpotQA, a multi-step reasoning benchmark. Furthermore, ReWOO demonstrates robustness under tool-failure scenarios. Beyond prompt efficiency, decoupling parametric modules from non-parametric tool calls enables instruction fine-tuning to offload LLMs into smaller language models, thus substantially reducing model parameters. Our illustrative work offloads reasoning ability from 175B GPT3.5 into 7B LLaMA, demonstrating the significant potential for truly efficient and scalable ALM systems.