Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model

Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive emergent abilities in natural language processing, but their democratization is hindered due to huge computation requirements and closed-source nature. Recent research on advancing open-source smaller LMs by distilling knowledge from black-box LLMs has obtained promising results in the instruction-following ability. However, the reasoning ability which is more challenging to foster, is relatively rarely explored. In this paper, we propose a tailored learning approach to distill such reasoning ability to smaller LMs to facilitate the democratization of the exclusive reasoning ability. In contrast to merely employing LLM as a data annotator, we exploit the potential of LLM as a reasoning teacher by building an interactive multi-round learning paradigm. This paradigm enables the student to expose its deficiencies to the black-box teacher who then can provide customized training data in return. Further, to exploit the reasoning potential of the smaller LM, we propose self-reflection learning to motivate the student to learn from self-made mistakes. The learning from self-reflection and LLM are all tailored to the student’s learning status, thanks to the seamless integration with the multi-round learning paradigm. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on mathematical and commonsense reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code will be available at https://github.com/Raibows/Learn-to-Reason.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.120
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1948–1966
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.120
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.120
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhaoyang Wang, Shaohan Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Jiahai Wang, Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, and Qi Zhang. 2023. Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1948–1966, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Democratizing Reasoning Ability: Tailored Learning from Large Language Model (Wang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.120.pdf