학술논문

Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Computer Science - Computation and Language
Computer Science - Artificial Intelligence
Language
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%).
Comment: Published at ICLR 2023. V2: added PaLM results; V3: added UL2 results; V4: camera ready version at ICLR 2023