Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Diao, Shizhe, Wang, Pengcheng, Lin, Yong, Pan, Rui, Liu, Xiang, Zhang, Tong
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Diao, Shizhe
Wang, Pengcheng
Lin, Yong
Pan, Rui
Liu, Xiang
Zhang, Tong
author_facet Diao, Shizhe
Wang, Pengcheng
Lin, Yong
Pan, Rui
Liu, Xiang
Zhang, Tong
contents The increasing scale of large language models (LLMs) brings emergent abilities to various complex tasks requiring reasoning, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. It is known that the effective design of task-specific prompts is critical for LLMs' ability to produce high-quality answers. In particular, an effective approach for complex question-and-answer tasks is example-based prompting with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs. However, current CoT methods rely on a fixed set of human-annotated exemplars, which are not necessarily the most effective examples for different tasks. This paper proposes a new method, Active-Prompt, to adapt LLMs to different tasks with task-specific example prompts (annotated with human-designed CoT reasoning). For this purpose, we propose a solution to the key problem of determining which questions are the most important and helpful ones to annotate from a pool of task-specific queries. By borrowing ideas from the related problem of uncertainty-based active learning, we introduce several metrics to characterize the uncertainty so as to select the most uncertain questions for annotation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art on eight complex reasoning tasks. Further analyses of different uncertainty metrics, pool sizes, zero-shot learning, and accuracy-uncertainty relationship demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code will be available at https://github.com/shizhediao/active-prompt.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2302_12246
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models
Diao, Shizhe
Wang, Pengcheng
Lin, Yong
Pan, Rui
Liu, Xiang
Zhang, Tong
Computation and Language
The increasing scale of large language models (LLMs) brings emergent abilities to various complex tasks requiring reasoning, such as arithmetic and commonsense reasoning. It is known that the effective design of task-specific prompts is critical for LLMs' ability to produce high-quality answers. In particular, an effective approach for complex question-and-answer tasks is example-based prompting with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs. However, current CoT methods rely on a fixed set of human-annotated exemplars, which are not necessarily the most effective examples for different tasks. This paper proposes a new method, Active-Prompt, to adapt LLMs to different tasks with task-specific example prompts (annotated with human-designed CoT reasoning). For this purpose, we propose a solution to the key problem of determining which questions are the most important and helpful ones to annotate from a pool of task-specific queries. By borrowing ideas from the related problem of uncertainty-based active learning, we introduce several metrics to characterize the uncertainty so as to select the most uncertain questions for annotation. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art on eight complex reasoning tasks. Further analyses of different uncertainty metrics, pool sizes, zero-shot learning, and accuracy-uncertainty relationship demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. Our code will be available at https://github.com/shizhediao/active-prompt.
title Active Prompting with Chain-of-Thought for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.12246