Self-Para-Consistency: Improving Reasoning Tasks at Low Cost for Large Language Models

Wenqing Chen, Weicheng Wang, Zhixuan Chu, Kui Ren, Zibin Zheng, Zhichao Lu


Abstract
Recently, the self-consistency decoding strategy has shown the ability to improve performance for complex reasoning tasks with large language models (LLMs). However, the costs may be high because the sampling process of the strategy generates some low-probability text, resulting in low-quality reasoning paths. As a consequence, it requires a relatively large sampling number to obtain good aggregation performance. In this paper, we propose an alternative strategy, self-para-consistency. It first generates multiple paraphrases for each test question, then generates reasoning paths for the original and all the paraphrased questions based on greedy decoding, and finally selects the most consistent answer. Since all the candidate paths have relatively high probabilities, the sampling number could be much smaller than the self-consistency strategy. Extensive experiments on complex reasoning datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing the sampling number.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.842
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14162–14167
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.842
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-acl.842
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Wenqing Chen, Weicheng Wang, Zhixuan Chu, Kui Ren, Zibin Zheng, and Zhichao Lu. 2024. Self-Para-Consistency: Improving Reasoning Tasks at Low Cost for Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024, pages 14162–14167, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Self-Para-Consistency: Improving Reasoning Tasks at Low Cost for Large Language Models (Chen et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.842.pdf