Abstract
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), establishing itself as a primary approach to solving complex reasoning tasks. Existing CoT synthesis approaches usually focus on simpler reasoning tasks and thus result in low-quality and inconsistent CoT prompts. In response to this challenge, we present an empirical investigation of CoT prompting and introduce CoTGenius, a novel framework designed for the automatic generation of superior CoT prompts. CoTGenius is developed based on three major evolution strategies, i.e., complicate, diversify, and specify—alongside two filtering mechanisms: evolutionary success judgement and correctness verification. We further employ CoTGenius to create an extensive CoT dataset, and subsequently fine-tune the Llama 2-Chat 7B and 13B models on this dataset. We call the resulting model ChainLM. To deal with the cumulative error issue in reasoning steps, we propose a step-level debating method, wherein multiple debaters discuss each reasoning step to arrive at the correct answer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ChainLM models exhibit enhanced proficiency in addressing a spectrum of complex reasoning problems compared to existing models. In addition, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the impact of data categories within CoTGenius on the model performance. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ChainLM.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.265
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2969–2983
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.265
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, and Ji-Rong Wen. 2024. ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2969–2983, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting (Cheng et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.265.pdf