Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement

Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang


Abstract
To enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models, researchers have extensively explored prompting methods, notably the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method which explicitly elicits human-like rationales. However, they have inadvertently overlooked the potential of enhancing model reasoning performance by formulating higher-quality problems. In this work, we start from the problem side and propose Self-Polish (SP), a novel method that facilitates the model’s reasoning by guiding it to progressively refine the given problems to be more comprehensible and solvable. We also explore several automatic prompting varients and propose the Self-Polish prompt bank for the community. SP is orthogonal to all other prompting methods of answer/reasoning side like CoT, allowing for seamless integration with state-of-the-art techniques for further improvement. Thorough experiments show that the proposed method attains notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. Furthermore, our method also showcases impressive performance on robustness evaluation. Codes and prompts are available at https://github.com/WooooDyy/Self-Polish.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.762
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
11383–11406
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.762
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.762
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhiheng Xi, Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, and Xuanjing Huang. 2023. Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 11383–11406, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement (Xi et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.762.pdf