ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, Ji-Rong Wen


Abstract
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), establishing itself as a primary approach to solving complex reasoning tasks. Existing CoT synthesis approaches usually focus on simpler reasoning tasks and thus result in low-quality and inconsistent CoT prompts. In response to this challenge, we present an empirical investigation of CoT prompting and introduce CoTGenius, a novel framework designed for the automatic generation of superior CoT prompts. CoTGenius is developed based on three major evolution strategies, i.e., complicate, diversify, and specify—alongside two filtering mechanisms: evolutionary success judgement and correctness verification. We further employ CoTGenius to create an extensive CoT dataset, and subsequently fine-tune the Llama 2-Chat 7B and 13B models on this dataset. We call the resulting model ChainLM. To deal with the cumulative error issue in reasoning steps, we propose a step-level debating method, wherein multiple debaters discuss each reasoning step to arrive at the correct answer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our ChainLM models exhibit enhanced proficiency in addressing a spectrum of complex reasoning problems compared to existing models. In addition, we conduct an in-depth analysis of the impact of data categories within CoTGenius on the model performance. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ChainLM.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.265
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
2969–2983
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.265
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaoxue Cheng, Junyi Li, Wayne Xin Zhao, and Ji-Rong Wen. 2024. ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2969–2983, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting (Cheng et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.265.pdf