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Main Authors: Liu, Rongxing, Shridhar, Kumar, Prajapat, Manish, Xia, Patrick, Sachan, Mrinmaya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16128
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author Liu, Rongxing
Shridhar, Kumar
Prajapat, Manish
Xia, Patrick
Sachan, Mrinmaya
author_facet Liu, Rongxing
Shridhar, Kumar
Prajapat, Manish
Xia, Patrick
Sachan, Mrinmaya
contents Tasks requiring deductive reasoning, especially those involving multiple steps, often demand adaptive strategies such as intermediate generation of rationales or programs, as no single approach is universally optimal. While Language Models (LMs) can enhance their outputs through iterative self-refinement and strategy adjustments, they frequently fail to apply the most effective strategy in their first attempt. This inefficiency raises the question: Can LMs learn to select the optimal strategy in the first attempt, without a need for refinement? To address this challenge, we introduce SMART (Self-learning Meta-strategy Agent for Reasoning Tasks), a novel framework that enables LMs to autonomously learn and select the most effective strategies for various reasoning tasks. We model the strategy selection process as a Markov Decision Process and leverage reinforcement learning-driven continuous self-improvement to allow the model to find the suitable strategy to solve a given task. Unlike traditional self-refinement methods that rely on multiple inference passes or external feedback, SMART allows an LM to internalize the outcomes of its own reasoning processes and adjust its strategy accordingly, aiming for correct solutions on the first attempt. Our experiments across various reasoning datasets and with different model architectures demonstrate that SMART significantly enhances the ability of models to choose optimal strategies without external guidance (+15 points on the GSM8K dataset). By achieving higher accuracy with a single inference pass, SMART not only improves performance but also reduces computational costs for refinement-based strategies, paving the way for more efficient and intelligent reasoning in LMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_16128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SMART: Self-learning Meta-strategy Agent for Reasoning Tasks
Liu, Rongxing
Shridhar, Kumar
Prajapat, Manish
Xia, Patrick
Sachan, Mrinmaya
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Tasks requiring deductive reasoning, especially those involving multiple steps, often demand adaptive strategies such as intermediate generation of rationales or programs, as no single approach is universally optimal. While Language Models (LMs) can enhance their outputs through iterative self-refinement and strategy adjustments, they frequently fail to apply the most effective strategy in their first attempt. This inefficiency raises the question: Can LMs learn to select the optimal strategy in the first attempt, without a need for refinement? To address this challenge, we introduce SMART (Self-learning Meta-strategy Agent for Reasoning Tasks), a novel framework that enables LMs to autonomously learn and select the most effective strategies for various reasoning tasks. We model the strategy selection process as a Markov Decision Process and leverage reinforcement learning-driven continuous self-improvement to allow the model to find the suitable strategy to solve a given task. Unlike traditional self-refinement methods that rely on multiple inference passes or external feedback, SMART allows an LM to internalize the outcomes of its own reasoning processes and adjust its strategy accordingly, aiming for correct solutions on the first attempt. Our experiments across various reasoning datasets and with different model architectures demonstrate that SMART significantly enhances the ability of models to choose optimal strategies without external guidance (+15 points on the GSM8K dataset). By achieving higher accuracy with a single inference pass, SMART not only improves performance but also reduces computational costs for refinement-based strategies, paving the way for more efficient and intelligent reasoning in LMs.
title SMART: Self-learning Meta-strategy Agent for Reasoning Tasks
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16128