Boosting of Thoughts: Trial-and-Error Problem Solving with Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Chen, Sijia, Li, Baochun, Niu, Di
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Chen, Sijia
Li, Baochun
Niu, Di
author_facet Chen, Sijia
Li, Baochun
Niu, Di
contents The reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on a wide range of problems critically relies on chain-of-thought prompting, which involves providing a few chain of thought demonstrations as exemplars in prompts. Recent work, e.g., Tree of Thoughts, has pointed out the importance of exploration and self-evaluation in reasoning step selection for complex problem solving. In this paper, we present Boosting of Thoughts (BoT), an automated prompting framework for problem solving with LLMs by iteratively exploring and self-evaluating many trees of thoughts in order to acquire an ensemble of trial-and-error reasoning experiences, which will serve as a new form of prompting to solve the complex problem. Starting from a simple prompt without requiring examples, BoT iteratively explores and evaluates a large collection of reasoning steps, and more importantly, uses error analysis obtained from the LLM on them to explicitly revise prompting, which in turn enhances reasoning step generation, until a final answer is attained. Our experiments with GPT-4 and Llama2 across extensive complex mathematical problems demonstrate that BoT consistently achieves higher or comparable problem-solving rates than other advanced prompting approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_11140
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Boosting of Thoughts: Trial-and-Error Problem Solving with Large Language Models
Chen, Sijia
Li, Baochun
Niu, Di
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
The reasoning performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on a wide range of problems critically relies on chain-of-thought prompting, which involves providing a few chain of thought demonstrations as exemplars in prompts. Recent work, e.g., Tree of Thoughts, has pointed out the importance of exploration and self-evaluation in reasoning step selection for complex problem solving. In this paper, we present Boosting of Thoughts (BoT), an automated prompting framework for problem solving with LLMs by iteratively exploring and self-evaluating many trees of thoughts in order to acquire an ensemble of trial-and-error reasoning experiences, which will serve as a new form of prompting to solve the complex problem. Starting from a simple prompt without requiring examples, BoT iteratively explores and evaluates a large collection of reasoning steps, and more importantly, uses error analysis obtained from the LLM on them to explicitly revise prompting, which in turn enhances reasoning step generation, until a final answer is attained. Our experiments with GPT-4 and Llama2 across extensive complex mathematical problems demonstrate that BoT consistently achieves higher or comparable problem-solving rates than other advanced prompting approaches.
title Boosting of Thoughts: Trial-and-Error Problem Solving with Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11140