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.

We present Qutr (Query Translator), a smart cross-lingual communication application for the travel domain. Qutr is a real-time messaging app that automatically translates conversations while supporting keyword-to-sentence matching. Qutr relies on querying a database that holds commonly used pre-translated travel-domain phrases and phrase templates in different languages with the use of keywords. The query matching supports paraphrases, incomplete keywords and some input spelling errors. The application addresses common cross-lingual communication issues such as translation accuracy, speed, privacy, and personalization.