Ge Wang
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2026
SVote-2S: Input-Side Evidence Voting for Two-Stage Self-Consistency in Multi-Hop QA
Guo Ouyang | Ge Wang | Tao Zhu | Yi Zou | Xuehao Yin | Guoliang Li | Fuchuan Ni
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Guo Ouyang | Ge Wang | Tao Zhu | Yi Zou | Xuehao Yin | Guoliang Li | Fuchuan Ni
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Self-consistency (SC) improves chain-of-thought reasoning by aggregating multiple sampled answers, yet all existing variants operate in the output space—they refine answer selection but leave the noisy input context unchanged. We observe that when multiple reasoning traces independently cite the same support items, those items are likely key evidence for the question. Building on this input-side consensus signal, we propose SVote-2S, a two-stage self-consistency framework for multi-hop question answering. In Stage 1, SVote-2S performs confidence-weighted voting over support items cited across N sampled traces and selects a compact evidence set. In Stage 2, the model re-reasons over a filtered context containing only the selected evidence paragraphs (about 15% of the original length on average on our benchmarks), enabling more focused reasoning. The final answer is determined by confidence-weighted fusion of samples from both stages. The fusion serves as a robustness safeguard, while the primary gain comes from evidence voting and re-reasoning. Across three benchmarks (HotpotQA, MuSiQue, 2WikiMultihopQA) and three LLMs, SVote-2S improves over SC by 5.36 EM on average and consistently outperforms the strongest output-side baseline (CISC) across all nine settings, without additional training or external retrieval.