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Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2203.11171v4

Summary

Chain-of-thought prompting helps large language models with multi-step reasoning, but it usually decodes just one greedy path, so a single mistake in that path makes the final answer wrong. The authors propose self-consistency, a decoding strategy that needs no training. It works in three steps: prompt the model with hand-written chain-of-thought exemplars, sample many different reasoning paths from the decoder, and pick the final answer that most paths agree on, which in effect marginalizes over the reasoning paths. The idea is that a hard problem can be solved correctly in several ways, while wrong reasoning tends to scatter across different answers. The method was tested on arithmetic and commonsense benchmarks with four models of different sizes: UL2-20B, GPT-3-175B, LaMDA-137B and PaLM-540B. It beat standard chain-of-thought prompting on every model and task, and reached new state-of-the-art arithmetic results with PaLM-540B and GPT-3. Because it needs no verifier, re-ranker, extra annotation or fine-tuning, it is a cheap add-on to any pre-trained model whenever the answer comes from a fixed set.

Key points

  • Absolute accuracy gains over chain-of-thought with greedy decoding: GSM8K +17.9%, SVAMP +11.0%, AQuA +12.2%, StrategyQA +6.4%, ARC-challenge +3.9%.
  • On PaLM-540B, GSM8K accuracy rose from 56.5 with greedy decoding to 74.4 with a simple majority vote over sampled answers.
  • An unweighted majority vote did about as well as weighting each answer by its length-normalized probability. Unnormalized weighting and weighted averages did clearly worse, which suggests the model's probabilities are poorly calibrated.
  • The method works with temperature, top-k and nucleus sampling. It outperformed sample-and-rank, beam search and ensemble baselines, and stayed robust when the prompts were imperfect.
  • It acts as a self-ensemble of a single model. One limitation is that the final answers must be parseable into a fixed answer set.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Mathematics & statistics

Cited by

2341 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 130 of them have a page here, the first 100 below, 2211 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2203.11171 · arXiv 2203.11171

@misc{wang2022self,
  title = {{Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models}},
  author = {Wang, Xuezhi and Wei, Jason and Schuurmans, Dale and Le, Quoc and Chi, Ed and Narang, Sharan and Chowdhery, Aakanksha and Zhou, Denny},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2203.11171},
  eprint = {2203.11171},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2203.11171}
}

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