Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier

Yifei Li, Zeqi Lin, Shizhuo Zhang, Qiang Fu, Bei Chen, Jian-Guang Lou, Weizhu Chen


Abstract
Few-shot learning is a challenging task that requires language models to generalize from limited examples. Large language models like GPT-3 and PaLM have made impressive progress in this area, but they still face difficulties in reasoning tasks such as GSM8K, a benchmark for arithmetic problems. To improve their reasoning skills, previous work has proposed to guide the language model with prompts that elicit a series of reasoning steps before giving the final answer, achieving a significant improvement on GSM8K from 17.9% to 58.1% in problem-solving rate. In this paper, we present DiVeRSe (Diverse Verifier on Reasoning Step), a novel approach that further enhances the reasoning capability of language models. DiVeRSe has three main components: first, it generates diverse prompts to explore different reasoning paths for the same question; second, it uses a verifier to filter out incorrect answers based on a weighted voting scheme; and third, it verifies each reasoning step individually instead of the whole chain. We evaluate DiVeRSe on the latest language model code-davinci-002 and show that it achieves new state-of-the-art results on six of eight reasoning benchmarks (e.g., GSM8K 74.4% to 83.2%).
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.291
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5315–5333
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.291
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.291
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yifei Li, Zeqi Lin, Shizhuo Zhang, Qiang Fu, Bei Chen, Jian-Guang Lou, and Weizhu Chen. 2023. Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5315–5333, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Making Language Models Better Reasoners with Step-Aware Verifier (Li et al., ACL 2023)
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