Generating Chain-of-Thoughts with a Pairwise-Comparison Approach to Searching for the Most Promising Intermediate Thought

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Zhen-Yu, Han, Siwei, Yao, Huaxiu, Niu, Gang, Sugiyama, Masashi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866911933138993152
author Zhang, Zhen-Yu
Han, Siwei
Yao, Huaxiu
Niu, Gang
Sugiyama, Masashi
author_facet Zhang, Zhen-Yu
Han, Siwei
Yao, Huaxiu
Niu, Gang
Sugiyama, Masashi
contents To improve the ability of the large language model (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning problems, chain-of-thoughts (CoT) methods were proposed to guide LLMs to reason step-by-step, enabling problem solving from simple to complex. State-of-the-art methods for generating such a chain involve interactive collaboration, where the learner generates candidate intermediate thoughts, evaluated by the LLM, guiding the generation of subsequent thoughts. However, a widespread yet understudied problem is that the evaluation from the LLM is typically noisy and unreliable, potentially misleading the generation process in selecting promising intermediate thoughts. In this paper, motivated by Vapnik's principle, we use pairwise-comparison evaluation instead of point-wise scoring to search for promising intermediate thoughts with the noisy feedback from the LLM. In each round, we randomly pair intermediate thoughts and directly prompt the LLM to select the more promising one from each pair, allowing us to identify the most promising thoughts through an iterative process. To further alleviate the noise in the comparison, we incorporate techniques from ensemble learning and dueling bandits, proposing two variants of the algorithm. Experiments on three real-world tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and verify the rationale of the pairwise comparison mechanism.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_06918
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generating Chain-of-Thoughts with a Pairwise-Comparison Approach to Searching for the Most Promising Intermediate Thought
Zhang, Zhen-Yu
Han, Siwei
Yao, Huaxiu
Niu, Gang
Sugiyama, Masashi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
To improve the ability of the large language model (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning problems, chain-of-thoughts (CoT) methods were proposed to guide LLMs to reason step-by-step, enabling problem solving from simple to complex. State-of-the-art methods for generating such a chain involve interactive collaboration, where the learner generates candidate intermediate thoughts, evaluated by the LLM, guiding the generation of subsequent thoughts. However, a widespread yet understudied problem is that the evaluation from the LLM is typically noisy and unreliable, potentially misleading the generation process in selecting promising intermediate thoughts. In this paper, motivated by Vapnik's principle, we use pairwise-comparison evaluation instead of point-wise scoring to search for promising intermediate thoughts with the noisy feedback from the LLM. In each round, we randomly pair intermediate thoughts and directly prompt the LLM to select the more promising one from each pair, allowing us to identify the most promising thoughts through an iterative process. To further alleviate the noise in the comparison, we incorporate techniques from ensemble learning and dueling bandits, proposing two variants of the algorithm. Experiments on three real-world tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm and verify the rationale of the pairwise comparison mechanism.
title Generating Chain-of-Thoughts with a Pairwise-Comparison Approach to Searching for the Most Promising Intermediate Thought
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.06918