Question-Analysis Prompting Improves LLM Performance in Reasoning Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yugeswardeenoo, Dharunish, Zhu, Kevin, O'Brien, Sean
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Yugeswardeenoo, Dharunish
Zhu, Kevin
O'Brien, Sean
author_facet Yugeswardeenoo, Dharunish
Zhu, Kevin
O'Brien, Sean
contents Although LLMs have the potential to transform many fields, they still underperform humans in reasoning tasks. Existing methods induce the model to produce step-by-step calculations, but this research explores the question: Does making the LLM analyze the question improve its performance? We propose a novel prompting strategy called Question Analysis Prompting (QAP), in which the model is prompted to explain the question in $n$ words before solving. The value of $n$ influences the length of response generated by the model. QAP is evaluated on GPT 3.5 Turbo and GPT 4 Turbo on arithmetic datasets GSM8K, AQuA, and SAT and commonsense dataset StrategyQA. QAP is compared with other state-of-the-art prompts including Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Plan and Solve Prompting (PS+) and Take A Deep Breath (TADB). QAP outperforms all state-of-the-art prompts on AQuA and SAT datasets on both GPT3.5 and GPT4. QAP consistently ranks among the top-2 prompts on 75\% of the tests. A key factor of QAP performance can be attributed to response length, where detailed responses are beneficial when answering harder questions, but can negatively affect easy questions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_03624
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Question-Analysis Prompting Improves LLM Performance in Reasoning Tasks
Yugeswardeenoo, Dharunish
Zhu, Kevin
O'Brien, Sean
Computation and Language
Although LLMs have the potential to transform many fields, they still underperform humans in reasoning tasks. Existing methods induce the model to produce step-by-step calculations, but this research explores the question: Does making the LLM analyze the question improve its performance? We propose a novel prompting strategy called Question Analysis Prompting (QAP), in which the model is prompted to explain the question in $n$ words before solving. The value of $n$ influences the length of response generated by the model. QAP is evaluated on GPT 3.5 Turbo and GPT 4 Turbo on arithmetic datasets GSM8K, AQuA, and SAT and commonsense dataset StrategyQA. QAP is compared with other state-of-the-art prompts including Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Plan and Solve Prompting (PS+) and Take A Deep Breath (TADB). QAP outperforms all state-of-the-art prompts on AQuA and SAT datasets on both GPT3.5 and GPT4. QAP consistently ranks among the top-2 prompts on 75\% of the tests. A key factor of QAP performance can be attributed to response length, where detailed responses are beneficial when answering harder questions, but can negatively affect easy questions.
title Question-Analysis Prompting Improves LLM Performance in Reasoning Tasks
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.03624