Exploring ReAct Prompting for Task-Oriented Dialogue: Insights and Shortcomings

Large language models (LLMs) gained immense popularity due to their impressive capabilities in unstructured conversations. Empowering LLMs with advanced prompting strategies such as reasoning and acting (ReAct) (Yao et al., 2022) has shown promise in solving complex tasks traditionally requiring reinforcement learning. In this work, we apply the ReAct strategy to guide LLMs performing task-oriented dialogue (TOD). We evaluate ReAct-based LLMs (ReAct-LLMs) both in simulation and with real users. While ReAct-LLMs severely underperform state-of-the-art approaches on success rate in simulation, this difference becomes less pronounced in human evaluation. Moreover, compared to the baseline, humans report higher subjective satisfaction with ReAct-LLM despite its lower success rate, most likely thanks to its natural and confidently phrased responses.