Let’s Sample Step by Step: Adaptive-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning and Coding with LLMs

Pranjal Aggarwal, Aman Madaan, Yiming Yang, Mausam


Abstract
A popular approach for improving the correctness of output from large language models (LLMs) is Self-Consistency - poll the LLM multiple times and output the most frequent solution. Existing Self-Consistency techniques always generate a constant number of samples per question, where a better approach will be to non-uniformly distribute the available budget based on the amount of agreement in the samples generated so far. In response, we introduce Adaptive-Consistency, a cost-efficient, model-agnostic technique that dynamically adjusts the number of samples per question using a lightweight stopping criterion. Our experiments over 17 reasoning and code generation datasets and three LLMs demonstrate that Adaptive-Consistency reduces sample budget by up to 7.9 times with an average accuracy drop of less than 0.1%
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.761
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12375–12396
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.761
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.761
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pranjal Aggarwal, Aman Madaan, Yiming Yang, and Mausam. 2023. Let’s Sample Step by Step: Adaptive-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning and Coding with LLMs. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 12375–12396, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Let’s Sample Step by Step: Adaptive-Consistency for Efficient Reasoning and Coding with LLMs (Aggarwal et al., EMNLP 2023)
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