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Main Authors: Chen, Guoxin, Tang, Kexin, Yang, Chao, Ye, Fuying, Qiao, Yu, Qian, Yiming
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13246
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author Chen, Guoxin
Tang, Kexin
Yang, Chao
Ye, Fuying
Qiao, Yu
Qian, Yiming
author_facet Chen, Guoxin
Tang, Kexin
Yang, Chao
Ye, Fuying
Qiao, Yu
Qian, Yiming
contents Elucidating the reasoning process with structured explanations from question to answer is crucial, as it significantly enhances the interpretability, traceability, and trustworthiness of question-answering (QA) systems. However, structured explanations demand models to perform intricately structured reasoning, which poses great challenges. Most existing methods focus on single-step reasoning through supervised learning, ignoring logical dependencies between steps. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning (RL) based methods overlook the structured relationships, underutilizing the potential of RL in structured reasoning. In this paper, we propose SEER, a novel method that maximizes a structure-based return to facilitate structured reasoning and explanation. Our proposed structure-based return precisely describes the hierarchical and branching structure inherent in structured reasoning, effectively capturing the intricate relationships between different reasoning steps. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained reward function to meticulously delineate diverse reasoning steps. Extensive experiments show that SEER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute improvement of 6.9% over RL-based methods on EntailmentBank, a 4.4% average improvement on STREET benchmark, and exhibiting outstanding efficiency and cross-dataset generalization performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Chen-GX/SEER.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_13246
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEER: Facilitating Structured Reasoning and Explanation via Reinforcement Learning
Chen, Guoxin
Tang, Kexin
Yang, Chao
Ye, Fuying
Qiao, Yu
Qian, Yiming
Computation and Language
Elucidating the reasoning process with structured explanations from question to answer is crucial, as it significantly enhances the interpretability, traceability, and trustworthiness of question-answering (QA) systems. However, structured explanations demand models to perform intricately structured reasoning, which poses great challenges. Most existing methods focus on single-step reasoning through supervised learning, ignoring logical dependencies between steps. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning (RL) based methods overlook the structured relationships, underutilizing the potential of RL in structured reasoning. In this paper, we propose SEER, a novel method that maximizes a structure-based return to facilitate structured reasoning and explanation. Our proposed structure-based return precisely describes the hierarchical and branching structure inherent in structured reasoning, effectively capturing the intricate relationships between different reasoning steps. In addition, we introduce a fine-grained reward function to meticulously delineate diverse reasoning steps. Extensive experiments show that SEER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an absolute improvement of 6.9% over RL-based methods on EntailmentBank, a 4.4% average improvement on STREET benchmark, and exhibiting outstanding efficiency and cross-dataset generalization performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/Chen-GX/SEER.
title SEER: Facilitating Structured Reasoning and Explanation via Reinforcement Learning
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.13246