Paraphrase and Solve: Exploring and Exploiting the Impact of Surface Form on Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Yue, Zhu, Yada, Antognini, Diego, Kim, Yoon, Zhang, Yang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhou, Yue
Zhu, Yada
Antognini, Diego
Kim, Yoon
Zhang, Yang
author_facet Zhou, Yue
Zhu, Yada
Antognini, Diego
Kim, Yoon
Zhang, Yang
contents This paper studies the relationship between the surface form of a mathematical problem and its solvability by large language models. We find that subtle alterations in the surface form can significantly impact the answer distribution and the solve rate, exposing the language model's lack of robustness and sensitivity to the surface form in reasoning through complex problems. To improve mathematical reasoning performance, we propose Self-Consistency-over-Paraphrases (SCoP), which diversifies reasoning paths from specific surface forms of the problem. We evaluate our approach on four mathematics reasoning benchmarks over three large language models and show that SCoP improves mathematical reasoning performance over vanilla self-consistency, particularly for problems initially deemed unsolvable. Finally, we provide additional experiments and discussion regarding problem difficulty and surface forms, including cross-model difficulty agreement and paraphrasing transferability, and Variance of Variations (VOV) for language model evaluation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_11500
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Paraphrase and Solve: Exploring and Exploiting the Impact of Surface Form on Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
Zhou, Yue
Zhu, Yada
Antognini, Diego
Kim, Yoon
Zhang, Yang
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
This paper studies the relationship between the surface form of a mathematical problem and its solvability by large language models. We find that subtle alterations in the surface form can significantly impact the answer distribution and the solve rate, exposing the language model's lack of robustness and sensitivity to the surface form in reasoning through complex problems. To improve mathematical reasoning performance, we propose Self-Consistency-over-Paraphrases (SCoP), which diversifies reasoning paths from specific surface forms of the problem. We evaluate our approach on four mathematics reasoning benchmarks over three large language models and show that SCoP improves mathematical reasoning performance over vanilla self-consistency, particularly for problems initially deemed unsolvable. Finally, we provide additional experiments and discussion regarding problem difficulty and surface forms, including cross-model difficulty agreement and paraphrasing transferability, and Variance of Variations (VOV) for language model evaluation.
title Paraphrase and Solve: Exploring and Exploiting the Impact of Surface Form on Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11500