Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought on Large Language Models for Open-domain Multi-hop Reasoning

Jinyuan Wang, Junlong Li, Hai Zhao


Abstract
In open-domain question-answering (ODQA), most existing questions require single-hop reasoning on commonsense. To further extend this task, we officially introduce open-domain multi-hop reasoning (ODMR) by answering multi-hop questions with explicit reasoning steps in open-domain setting. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have found significant utility in facilitating ODQA without external corpus. Furthermore, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts the reasoning capability of LLMs to a greater extent with manual or automated paradigms. However, existing automated methods lack of quality assurance, while manual approaches suffer from limited scalability and poor diversity, hindering the capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we propose Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought (SP-CoT), an automated framework to mass-produce high quality CoTs of LLMs, by LLMs and for LLMs. SP-CoT introduces an automated generation pipeline of high quality ODMR datasets, an adaptive sampler for in-context CoT selection and self-prompted inference via in-context learning. Extensive experiments on four multi-hop question-answering benchmarks show that our proposed SP-CoT not only significantly surpasses the previous SOTA methods on large-scale (175B) LLMs, but also nearly doubles the zero-shot performance of small-scale (13B) LLMs. Further analysis reveals the remarkable capability of SP-CoT to elicit direct and concise intermediate reasoning steps by recalling ~50% of intermediate answers on MuSiQue-Ans dataset.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.179
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2717–2731
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.179
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.179
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jinyuan Wang, Junlong Li, and Hai Zhao. 2023. Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought on Large Language Models for Open-domain Multi-hop Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2717–2731, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought on Large Language Models for Open-domain Multi-hop Reasoning (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2023.findings-emnlp.179.pdf