Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models

Jiashuo Sun, Yi Luo, Yeyun Gong, Chen Lin, Yelong Shen, Jian Guo, Nan Duan


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) can achieve impressive performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, where step-by-step reasoning is provided to guide LLMs to generate answers to questions, and the question-rationale-answer triplets are utilized as demonstration exemplars. However, the reasoning chains of demonstrations generated by LLMs are observed to be prone to errors, which can subsequently lead to incorrect reasoning during inference. Furthermore, inappropriate exemplars, e.g., overly simplistic or complex exemplars depending on the question’s difficulty level, can affect the LLM’s performance. To address these issues, we introduce Iter-CoT (Iterative bootstrapping in Chain-of-Thoughts prompting). Iter-CoT has two advantages: (1) it adopts iterative bootstrapping that enables LLMs to rectify errors autonomously, resulting in more precise and comprehensive reasoning chains. (2) it selects exemplars of challenging yet answerable (i.e., the LLM has the potential to answer correctly) questions, enhancing the LLMs’ generalizability to answer questions with varying difficulty levels. Experimental results exhibit Iter-CoT superior performance on three distinct reasoning tasks on ten datasets.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.257
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4074–4101
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.257
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.257
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiashuo Sun, Yi Luo, Yeyun Gong, Chen Lin, Yelong Shen, Jian Guo, and Nan Duan. 2024. Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 4074–4101, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (Sun et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.257.pdf