Town Hall Debate Prompting: Enhancing Logical Reasoning in LLMs through Multi-Persona Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sandwar, Vivaan, Jain, Bhav, Thangaraj, Rishan, Garg, Ishaan, Lam, Michael, Zhu, Kevin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Sandwar, Vivaan
Jain, Bhav
Thangaraj, Rishan
Garg, Ishaan
Lam, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
author_facet Sandwar, Vivaan
Jain, Bhav
Thangaraj, Rishan
Garg, Ishaan
Lam, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
contents Debate is a commonly used form of human communication catered towards problem-solving because of its efficiency. Debate fundamentally allows multiple viewpoints to be brought up in problem-solving, and for complex problems, each viewpoint opens a new path for problem-solving. In this work, we apply this concept to LLM decision-making by proposing town hall-style debate prompting (THDP), a prompting method that splices a language model into multiple personas that will debate one another to reach a conclusion. Our experimental pipeline varies both the number of personas and the personality types of each persona to find the optimum town hall size and personality for benchmark performance as measured by ZebraLogic bench, a reasoning-intensive benchmark characterized by both multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. Our experimental results demonstrate that a town hall size of 5 personas with LLM-determined personality types performs optimally on ZebraLogic, achieving a 13\% improvement over one-shot CoT baselines in per-cell accuracy in GPT-4o, 9% puzzle accuracy increase in Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and an improvement in hard puzzle accuracy from 10-15%.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_15725
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Town Hall Debate Prompting: Enhancing Logical Reasoning in LLMs through Multi-Persona Interaction
Sandwar, Vivaan
Jain, Bhav
Thangaraj, Rishan
Garg, Ishaan
Lam, Michael
Zhu, Kevin
Computation and Language
Debate is a commonly used form of human communication catered towards problem-solving because of its efficiency. Debate fundamentally allows multiple viewpoints to be brought up in problem-solving, and for complex problems, each viewpoint opens a new path for problem-solving. In this work, we apply this concept to LLM decision-making by proposing town hall-style debate prompting (THDP), a prompting method that splices a language model into multiple personas that will debate one another to reach a conclusion. Our experimental pipeline varies both the number of personas and the personality types of each persona to find the optimum town hall size and personality for benchmark performance as measured by ZebraLogic bench, a reasoning-intensive benchmark characterized by both multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions. Our experimental results demonstrate that a town hall size of 5 personas with LLM-determined personality types performs optimally on ZebraLogic, achieving a 13\% improvement over one-shot CoT baselines in per-cell accuracy in GPT-4o, 9% puzzle accuracy increase in Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and an improvement in hard puzzle accuracy from 10-15%.
title Town Hall Debate Prompting: Enhancing Logical Reasoning in LLMs through Multi-Persona Interaction
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15725