LaRS: Latent Reasoning Skills for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Xu, Zifan, Wang, Haozhu, Bespalov, Dmitriy, Wu, Xian, Stone, Peter, Qi, Yanjun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Xu, Zifan
Wang, Haozhu
Bespalov, Dmitriy
Wu, Xian
Stone, Peter
Qi, Yanjun
author_facet Xu, Zifan
Wang, Haozhu
Bespalov, Dmitriy
Wu, Xian
Stone, Peter
Qi, Yanjun
contents Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a popular in-context learning (ICL) approach for large language models (LLMs), especially when tackling complex reasoning tasks. Traditional ICL approaches construct prompts using examples that contain questions similar to the input question. However, CoT prompting, which includes crucial intermediate reasoning steps (rationales) within its examples, necessitates selecting examples based on these rationales rather than the questions themselves. Existing methods require human experts or pre-trained LLMs to describe the skill, a high-level abstraction of rationales, to guide the selection. These methods, however, are often costly and difficult to scale. Instead, this paper introduces a new approach named Latent Reasoning Skills (LaRS) that employs unsupervised learning to create a latent space representation of rationales, with a latent variable called a reasoning skill. Concurrently, LaRS learns a reasoning policy to determine the required reasoning skill for a given question. Then the ICL examples are selected by aligning the reasoning skills between past examples and the question. This approach is theoretically grounded and compute-efficient, eliminating the need for auxiliary LLM inference or manual prompt design. Empirical results demonstrate that LaRS consistently outperforms SOTA skill-based selection methods, processing example banks four times faster, reducing LLM inferences during the selection stage by half, and showing greater robustness to sub-optimal example banks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_04684
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LaRS: Latent Reasoning Skills for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Xu, Zifan
Wang, Haozhu
Bespalov, Dmitriy
Wu, Xian
Stone, Peter
Qi, Yanjun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a popular in-context learning (ICL) approach for large language models (LLMs), especially when tackling complex reasoning tasks. Traditional ICL approaches construct prompts using examples that contain questions similar to the input question. However, CoT prompting, which includes crucial intermediate reasoning steps (rationales) within its examples, necessitates selecting examples based on these rationales rather than the questions themselves. Existing methods require human experts or pre-trained LLMs to describe the skill, a high-level abstraction of rationales, to guide the selection. These methods, however, are often costly and difficult to scale. Instead, this paper introduces a new approach named Latent Reasoning Skills (LaRS) that employs unsupervised learning to create a latent space representation of rationales, with a latent variable called a reasoning skill. Concurrently, LaRS learns a reasoning policy to determine the required reasoning skill for a given question. Then the ICL examples are selected by aligning the reasoning skills between past examples and the question. This approach is theoretically grounded and compute-efficient, eliminating the need for auxiliary LLM inference or manual prompt design. Empirical results demonstrate that LaRS consistently outperforms SOTA skill-based selection methods, processing example banks four times faster, reducing LLM inferences during the selection stage by half, and showing greater robustness to sub-optimal example banks.
title LaRS: Latent Reasoning Skills for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04684