Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Wang, Xinglin, Feng, Shaoxiong, Li, Yiwei, Yuan, Peiwen, Zhang, Yueqi, Tan, Chuyi, Pan, Boyuan, Hu, Yao, Li, Kan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Wang, Xinglin
Feng, Shaoxiong
Li, Yiwei
Yuan, Peiwen
Zhang, Yueqi
Tan, Chuyi
Pan, Boyuan
Hu, Yao
Li, Kan
author_facet Wang, Xinglin
Feng, Shaoxiong
Li, Yiwei
Yuan, Peiwen
Zhang, Yueqi
Tan, Chuyi
Pan, Boyuan
Hu, Yao
Li, Kan
contents Self-consistency (SC), a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning, shows significant gains across various multi-step reasoning tasks but comes with a high cost due to multiple sampling with the preset size. Its variants, Adaptive self-consistency (ASC) and Early-stopping self-consistency (ESC), dynamically adjust the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples, reducing the cost of SC with minimal impact on performance. Both methods, however, do not exploit the prior information about question difficulty. It often results in unnecessary repeated sampling for easy questions that could be accurately answered with just one attempt, wasting resources. To tackle this problem, we propose Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency (DSC), which leverages the difficulty information of batch queries from both prior and posterior perspectives to adaptively allocate inference resources, further reducing the overall cost of SC. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DSC, we conduct extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning on six benchmarks. The empirical results show that DSC consistently surpasses the strong baseline ASC and ESC in terms of costs by a significant margin, while attaining comparable performances.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_13457
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning
Wang, Xinglin
Feng, Shaoxiong
Li, Yiwei
Yuan, Peiwen
Zhang, Yueqi
Tan, Chuyi
Pan, Boyuan
Hu, Yao
Li, Kan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Self-consistency (SC), a widely used decoding strategy for chain-of-thought reasoning, shows significant gains across various multi-step reasoning tasks but comes with a high cost due to multiple sampling with the preset size. Its variants, Adaptive self-consistency (ASC) and Early-stopping self-consistency (ESC), dynamically adjust the number of samples based on the posterior distribution of a set of pre-samples, reducing the cost of SC with minimal impact on performance. Both methods, however, do not exploit the prior information about question difficulty. It often results in unnecessary repeated sampling for easy questions that could be accurately answered with just one attempt, wasting resources. To tackle this problem, we propose Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency (DSC), which leverages the difficulty information of batch queries from both prior and posterior perspectives to adaptively allocate inference resources, further reducing the overall cost of SC. To demonstrate the effectiveness of DSC, we conduct extensive experiments on three popular categories of reasoning tasks: arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning on six benchmarks. The empirical results show that DSC consistently surpasses the strong baseline ASC and ESC in terms of costs by a significant margin, while attaining comparable performances.
title Make Every Penny Count: Difficulty-Adaptive Self-Consistency for Cost-Efficient Reasoning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.13457