An Examination on the Effectiveness of Divide-and-Conquer Prompting in Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Yizhou, Du, Lun, Cao, Defu, Fu, Qiang, Liu, Yan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhang, Yizhou
Du, Lun
Cao, Defu
Fu, Qiang
Liu, Yan
author_facet Zhang, Yizhou
Du, Lun
Cao, Defu
Fu, Qiang
Liu, Yan
contents Foundation models, such as Large language Models (LLMs), have attracted significant amount of interest due to their large number of applications. However, when handling tasks involving repetitive sub-tasks and/or deceptive contents, such as arithmetic calculation and article-level fake news detection, simple instructional prompts suffer from inaccurate responses. Existing works show that more complicated prompting strategies, such as Chain-of-Thoughts and Least-to-Most, can unlock LLM's powerful capacity in diverse areas. Recent researches reveal that simple divide-and-conquer prompting strategy, i.e. simply dividing the input sequence to multiple sub-inputs, can also substantially improve LLM's performance in some specific tasks such as misinformation detection. In this paper, we aim at examining the utility of divide-and-conquer prompting strategy and answer on which kind of tasks this strategy gets advantages. Specifically, we provide a theoretic analysis to divide-and-conquer prompting strategy and help us identify the specific tasks where DaC prompting can bring performance boost with theoretic guarantee. We then present two cases (large integer arithmetic and fact verification) where experimental results aligns with our theoretic analysis.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05359
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Examination on the Effectiveness of Divide-and-Conquer Prompting in Large Language Models
Zhang, Yizhou
Du, Lun
Cao, Defu
Fu, Qiang
Liu, Yan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Foundation models, such as Large language Models (LLMs), have attracted significant amount of interest due to their large number of applications. However, when handling tasks involving repetitive sub-tasks and/or deceptive contents, such as arithmetic calculation and article-level fake news detection, simple instructional prompts suffer from inaccurate responses. Existing works show that more complicated prompting strategies, such as Chain-of-Thoughts and Least-to-Most, can unlock LLM's powerful capacity in diverse areas. Recent researches reveal that simple divide-and-conquer prompting strategy, i.e. simply dividing the input sequence to multiple sub-inputs, can also substantially improve LLM's performance in some specific tasks such as misinformation detection. In this paper, we aim at examining the utility of divide-and-conquer prompting strategy and answer on which kind of tasks this strategy gets advantages. Specifically, we provide a theoretic analysis to divide-and-conquer prompting strategy and help us identify the specific tasks where DaC prompting can bring performance boost with theoretic guarantee. We then present two cases (large integer arithmetic and fact verification) where experimental results aligns with our theoretic analysis.
title An Examination on the Effectiveness of Divide-and-Conquer Prompting in Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05359