@inproceedings{tyen-etal-2024-llms,
title = "{LLM}s cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them given the error location",
author = "Tyen, Gladys and
Mansoor, Hassan and
Carbune, Victor and
Chen, Peter and
Mak, Tony",
editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei and
Martins, Andre and
Srikumar, Vivek",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024",
month = aug,
year = "2024",
address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.826",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.826",
pages = "13894--13908",
abstract = "While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023b; Madaan et al.,2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we show that poor self-correction performance stems from LLMs{'} inability tofind logical mistakes, rather than their ability to correct a known mistake. Firstly, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs ontheir mistake-finding ability and demonstrate that they generally struggle with the task, even in highly objective, unambiguous cases. Secondly, we test the correction abilities of LLMs {--} separately from mistake finding {--} using a backtracking setup that feeds ground truth mistake location information to the model. We show that this boosts downstream task performance across our 5 reasoning tasks, indicating that LLMs{'} correction abilities are robust. Finally, we show that it is possible to obtain mistake location information without ground truth labels or in-domain training data. We train a small classifier with out-of-domain data, which exhibits stronger mistake-finding performance than prompting a large model. We release our dataset of LLM-generated logical mistakes, BIG-Bench Mistake, to enable further research into locating LLM reasoning mistakes.",
}
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<abstract>While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023b; Madaan et al.,2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we show that poor self-correction performance stems from LLMs’ inability tofind logical mistakes, rather than their ability to correct a known mistake. Firstly, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs ontheir mistake-finding ability and demonstrate that they generally struggle with the task, even in highly objective, unambiguous cases. Secondly, we test the correction abilities of LLMs – separately from mistake finding – using a backtracking setup that feeds ground truth mistake location information to the model. We show that this boosts downstream task performance across our 5 reasoning tasks, indicating that LLMs’ correction abilities are robust. Finally, we show that it is possible to obtain mistake location information without ground truth labels or in-domain training data. We train a small classifier with out-of-domain data, which exhibits stronger mistake-finding performance than prompting a large model. We release our dataset of LLM-generated logical mistakes, BIG-Bench Mistake, to enable further research into locating LLM reasoning mistakes.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them given the error location
%A Tyen, Gladys
%A Mansoor, Hassan
%A Carbune, Victor
%A Chen, Peter
%A Mak, Tony
%Y Ku, Lun-Wei
%Y Martins, Andre
%Y Srikumar, Vivek
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
%D 2024
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Bangkok, Thailand
%F tyen-etal-2024-llms
%X While self-correction has shown promise in improving LLM outputs in terms of style and quality (e.g. Chen et al., 2023b; Madaan et al.,2023), recent attempts to self-correct logical or reasoning errors often cause correct answers to become incorrect, resulting in worse performances overall (Huang et al., 2023). In this paper, we show that poor self-correction performance stems from LLMs’ inability tofind logical mistakes, rather than their ability to correct a known mistake. Firstly, we benchmark several state-of-the-art LLMs ontheir mistake-finding ability and demonstrate that they generally struggle with the task, even in highly objective, unambiguous cases. Secondly, we test the correction abilities of LLMs – separately from mistake finding – using a backtracking setup that feeds ground truth mistake location information to the model. We show that this boosts downstream task performance across our 5 reasoning tasks, indicating that LLMs’ correction abilities are robust. Finally, we show that it is possible to obtain mistake location information without ground truth labels or in-domain training data. We train a small classifier with out-of-domain data, which exhibits stronger mistake-finding performance than prompting a large model. We release our dataset of LLM-generated logical mistakes, BIG-Bench Mistake, to enable further research into locating LLM reasoning mistakes.
%R 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.826
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.826
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.826
%P 13894-13908
Markdown (Informal)
[LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them given the error location](https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.826) (Tyen et al., Findings 2024)
ACL