Hypothesis Search: Inductive Reasoning with Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Ruocheng, Zelikman, Eric, Poesia, Gabriel, Pu, Yewen, Haber, Nick, Goodman, Noah D.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Wang, Ruocheng
Zelikman, Eric
Poesia, Gabriel
Pu, Yewen
Haber, Nick
Goodman, Noah D.
author_facet Wang, Ruocheng
Zelikman, Eric
Poesia, Gabriel
Pu, Yewen
Haber, Nick
Goodman, Noah D.
contents Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which robustly generalize to novel scenarios. Recent work evaluates large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning tasks by directly prompting them yielding "in context learning." This works well for straightforward inductive tasks but performs poorly on complex tasks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). In this work, we propose to improve the inductive reasoning ability of LLMs by generating explicit hypotheses at multiple levels of abstraction: we prompt the LLM to propose multiple abstract hypotheses about the problem, in natural language, then implement the natural language hypotheses as concrete Python programs. These programs can be verified by running on observed examples and generalized to novel inputs. To reduce the hypothesis search space, we explore steps to filter the set of hypotheses to implement: we either ask the LLM to summarize them into a smaller set of hypotheses or ask human annotators to select a subset. We verify our pipeline's effectiveness on the ARC visual inductive reasoning benchmark, its variant 1D-ARC, string transformation dataset SyGuS, and list transformation dataset List Functions. On a random 100-problem subset of ARC, our automated pipeline using LLM summaries achieves 30% accuracy, outperforming the direct prompting baseline (accuracy of 17%). With the minimal human input of selecting from LLM-generated candidates, performance is boosted to 33%. Our ablations show that both abstract hypothesis generation and concrete program representations benefit LLMs on inductive reasoning tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_05660
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hypothesis Search: Inductive Reasoning with Language Models
Wang, Ruocheng
Zelikman, Eric
Poesia, Gabriel
Pu, Yewen
Haber, Nick
Goodman, Noah D.
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which robustly generalize to novel scenarios. Recent work evaluates large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning tasks by directly prompting them yielding "in context learning." This works well for straightforward inductive tasks but performs poorly on complex tasks such as the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC). In this work, we propose to improve the inductive reasoning ability of LLMs by generating explicit hypotheses at multiple levels of abstraction: we prompt the LLM to propose multiple abstract hypotheses about the problem, in natural language, then implement the natural language hypotheses as concrete Python programs. These programs can be verified by running on observed examples and generalized to novel inputs. To reduce the hypothesis search space, we explore steps to filter the set of hypotheses to implement: we either ask the LLM to summarize them into a smaller set of hypotheses or ask human annotators to select a subset. We verify our pipeline's effectiveness on the ARC visual inductive reasoning benchmark, its variant 1D-ARC, string transformation dataset SyGuS, and list transformation dataset List Functions. On a random 100-problem subset of ARC, our automated pipeline using LLM summaries achieves 30% accuracy, outperforming the direct prompting baseline (accuracy of 17%). With the minimal human input of selecting from LLM-generated candidates, performance is boosted to 33%. Our ablations show that both abstract hypothesis generation and concrete program representations benefit LLMs on inductive reasoning tasks.
title Hypothesis Search: Inductive Reasoning with Language Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.05660