# ExpNote: Black-box Large Language Models are Better Task Solvers with Experience Notebook

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07032 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07032/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 16 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Nov 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 16 of 16)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [ConceptNet 5.5: An Open Multilingual Graph of General Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03975/) (2016)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04023/) (2023)
- [GPT Understands, Too](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10385/) (2021)
- [Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.02336/) (2022)
- [CLUTRR: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Inductive Reasoning from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06177/) (2019)
- [Using millions of emoji occurrences to learn any-domain representations for detecting sentiment, emotion and sarcasm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.00524/) (2017)
- [RL4F: Generating Natural Language Feedback with Reinforcement Learning for Repairing Model Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.08844/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking large language models for biomedical natural language processing applications and recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16326/) (2023)
- [METS-CoV: A Dataset of Medical Entity and Targeted Sentiment on COVID-19 Related Tweets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.13773/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Towards Agentic Self-Learning LLMs in Search Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14253/) (2025)
- [CMQCIC-Bench: A Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Medical Quality Control Indicator Calculation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11703/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Black-box Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great power in solving various tasks and are considered general problem solvers. However, LLMs still fail in many specific tasks although understand the task instruction. In this paper, we focus on the problem of boosting the ability of black-box LLMs to solve downstream tasks. We propose ExpNote, an automated framework to help LLMs better adapt to unfamiliar tasks through reflecting and noting experiences from training data and retrieving them from external memory during testing. We evaluate ExpNote on multiple tasks and the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the performance of black-box LLMs. The data and code are available at https://github.com/forangel2014/ExpNote