Do LLM Agents Have Regret? A Case Study in Online Learning and Games

Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly employed for (interactive) decision-making, via the development of LLM-based autonomous agents. Despite their emerging successes, the performance of LLM agents in decision-making has not been fully investigated through quantitative metrics, especially in the multi-agent setting when they interact with each other, a typical scenario in real-world LLM-agent applications. To better understand the limits of LLM agents in these interactive environments, we propose to study their interactions in benchmark decision-making settings in online learning and game theory, through the performance metric of regret. We first empirically study the no-regret behaviors of LLMs in canonical non-stochastic online learning problems, as well as the emergence of equilibria when LLM agents interact through playing repeated games. We then provide some theoretical insights into the no-regret behaviors of LLM agents, under certain assumptions on the supervised pre-training and the rationality model of human decision-makers who generate the data. Notably, we also identify (simple) cases where advanced LLMs such as GPT-4 fail to be no-regret. To further promote the no-regret behaviors, we propose a novel unsupervised training loss of regret-loss, which, in contrast to the supervised pre-training loss, does not require the labels of (optimal) actions. Finally, we establish the statistical guarantee of generalization bound for regret-loss minimization, and more importantly, the optimization guarantee that minimizing such a loss may automatically lead to known no-regret learning algorithms, when single-layer self-attention models are used. Our further experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our regret-loss, especially in addressing the above “regrettable” cases.