Physics of Language Models: Part 2.2, How to Learn From Mistakes on Grade-School Math Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Ye, Tian, Xu, Zicheng, Li, Yuanzhi, Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Ye, Tian
Xu, Zicheng
Li, Yuanzhi
Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan
author_facet Ye, Tian
Xu, Zicheng
Li, Yuanzhi
Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan
contents Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving reasoning tasks; however, even the strongest models still occasionally make reasoning mistakes. Recently, there has been active research aimed at improving reasoning accuracy, particularly by using pretrained language models to "self-correct" their mistakes via multi-round prompting. In this paper, we follow this line of work but focus on understanding the usefulness of incorporating "error-correction" data directly into the pretraining stage. This data consists of erroneous solution steps immediately followed by their corrections. Using a synthetic math dataset, we show promising results: this type of pretrain data can help language models achieve higher reasoning accuracy directly (i.e., through simple auto-regression, without multi-round prompting) compared to pretraining on the same amount of error-free data. We also delve into many details, such as (1) how this approach differs from beam search, (2) how such data can be prepared, (3) whether masking is needed on the erroneous tokens, (4) the amount of error required, (5) whether such data can be deferred to the fine-tuning stage, and many others.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_16293
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Physics of Language Models: Part 2.2, How to Learn From Mistakes on Grade-School Math Problems
Ye, Tian
Xu, Zicheng
Li, Yuanzhi
Allen-Zhu, Zeyuan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving reasoning tasks; however, even the strongest models still occasionally make reasoning mistakes. Recently, there has been active research aimed at improving reasoning accuracy, particularly by using pretrained language models to "self-correct" their mistakes via multi-round prompting. In this paper, we follow this line of work but focus on understanding the usefulness of incorporating "error-correction" data directly into the pretraining stage. This data consists of erroneous solution steps immediately followed by their corrections. Using a synthetic math dataset, we show promising results: this type of pretrain data can help language models achieve higher reasoning accuracy directly (i.e., through simple auto-regression, without multi-round prompting) compared to pretraining on the same amount of error-free data. We also delve into many details, such as (1) how this approach differs from beam search, (2) how such data can be prepared, (3) whether masking is needed on the erroneous tokens, (4) the amount of error required, (5) whether such data can be deferred to the fine-tuning stage, and many others.
title Physics of Language Models: Part 2.2, How to Learn From Mistakes on Grade-School Math Problems
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.16293