SESKStuff Everyone Should Know
SESK: Stuff Everyone Should Know · sesk.info/ai-react-reason-and-act

What does the ReAct method have a language model do?

Interleave reasoning steps with actions, like searching, and use what comes back.

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Why: ReAct mixes thinking and doing: the model reasons about what it needs, takes an action such as a Wikipedia lookup, reads the result, and reasons again. Fresh evidence cuts down on hallucination.

Huh, didn't know that: On two decision-making benchmarks, ReAct beat earlier methods by 34 and 10 points with only one or two examples.

The dad joke
ReAct is how I cook. Think, taste, add salt, think again, order pizza.
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References

Answer: Alternate reasoning steps with actions. ReAct mixes thinking and doing: the model reasons about what it needs, takes an action such as a Wikipedia lookup, reads the result, and reasons again. Fresh evidence cuts down on hallucination.

  1. Yao et al., ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models (arXiv 2210.03629) arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629
    generate both reasoning traces and task-specific actions in an interleaved manner
    Checked 2026-10-10.

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