CoT-based Synthesizer: Enhancing LLM Performance through Answer Synthesis

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zhang, Bohan, Zhang, Xiaokang, Zhang, Jing, Yu, Jifan, Luo, Sijia, Tang, Jie
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhang, Bohan
Zhang, Xiaokang
Zhang, Jing
Yu, Jifan
Luo, Sijia
Tang, Jie
author_facet Zhang, Bohan
Zhang, Xiaokang
Zhang, Jing
Yu, Jifan
Luo, Sijia
Tang, Jie
contents Current inference scaling methods, such as Self-consistency and Best-of-N, have proven effective in improving the accuracy of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on the quality of candidate responses and are unable to produce correct answers when all candidates are incorrect. In this paper, we propose a novel inference scaling strategy, CoT-based Synthesizer, which leverages CoT reasoning to synthesize superior answers by analyzing complementary information from multiple candidate responses, even when all candidate responses are flawed. To enable a lightweight and cost-effective implementation, we introduce an automated data generation pipeline that creates diverse training data. This allows smaller LLMs trained on this data to improve the inference accuracy of larger models, including API-based LLMs. Experimental results across four benchmark datasets with seven policy models demonstrate that our method significantly enhances performance, with gains of 11.8% for Llama3-8B and 10.3% for GPT-4o on the MATH dataset. The corresponding training data and code are publicly available on https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/CoT-based-Synthesizer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01668
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CoT-based Synthesizer: Enhancing LLM Performance through Answer Synthesis
Zhang, Bohan
Zhang, Xiaokang
Zhang, Jing
Yu, Jifan
Luo, Sijia
Tang, Jie
Computation and Language
Current inference scaling methods, such as Self-consistency and Best-of-N, have proven effective in improving the accuracy of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. However, these methods rely heavily on the quality of candidate responses and are unable to produce correct answers when all candidates are incorrect. In this paper, we propose a novel inference scaling strategy, CoT-based Synthesizer, which leverages CoT reasoning to synthesize superior answers by analyzing complementary information from multiple candidate responses, even when all candidate responses are flawed. To enable a lightweight and cost-effective implementation, we introduce an automated data generation pipeline that creates diverse training data. This allows smaller LLMs trained on this data to improve the inference accuracy of larger models, including API-based LLMs. Experimental results across four benchmark datasets with seven policy models demonstrate that our method significantly enhances performance, with gains of 11.8% for Llama3-8B and 10.3% for GPT-4o on the MATH dataset. The corresponding training data and code are publicly available on https://github.com/RUCKBReasoning/CoT-based-Synthesizer.
title CoT-based Synthesizer: Enhancing LLM Performance through Answer Synthesis
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01668