A Survey on Large Language Model based Autonomous Agents

Autonomous agents have long been a prominent research topic in the academic community. Previous research in this field often focuses on training agents with limited knowledge within isolated environments, which diverges significantly from the human learning processes, and thus makes the agents hard to achieve human-like decisions. Recently, through the acquisition of vast amounts of web knowledge, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in achieving human-level intelligence. This has sparked an upsurge in studies investigating autonomous agents based on LLMs. To harness the full potential of LLMs, researchers have devised diverse agent architectures tailored to different applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of these studies, delivering a systematic review of the field of autonomous agents from a holistic perspective. More specifically, our focus lies in the construction of LLM-based agents, for which we propose a unified framework that encompasses a majority of the previous work. Additionally, we provide a summary of the various applications of LLM-based AI agents in the domains of social science, natural science, and engineering. Lastly, we discuss the commonly employed evaluation strategies for LLM-based AI agents. Based on the previous studies, we also present several challenges and future directions in this field. To keep track of this field and continuously update our survey, we maintain a repository for the related references at https://github.com/Paitesanshi/LLM-Agent-Survey.