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Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models

2022/03/21 by Xuezhi Wang, Wang, Xuezhi, Jason Wei +15 · 4 voices · 1,769 citations
Computer Science · #Advanced Graph Neural Networks #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling #cs.AI #cs.CL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2203.11171

arxiv published 2022/03/21 · arxiv updated 2023/03/07

Abstract

Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting. It first samples a diverse set of reasoning paths instead of only taking the greedy one, and then selects the most consistent answer by marginalizing out the sampled reasoning paths. Self-consistency leverages the intuition that a complex reasoning problem typically admits multiple different ways of thinking leading to its unique correct answer. Our extensive empirical evaluation shows that self-consistency boosts the performance of chain-of-thought prompting with a striking margin on a range of popular arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K (+17.9%), SVAMP (+11.0%), AQuA (+12.2%), StrategyQA (+6.4%) and ARC-challenge (+3.9%).

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