Expediting and Elevating Large Language Model Reasoning via Hidden Chain-of-Thought Decoding

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in significantly longer output sequences, leading to increased computational costs and latency during inference. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compress the CoT process through semantic alignment, enabling more efficient decoding while preserving the benefits of CoT reasoning. Our method introduces an auxiliary CoT model that learns to generate and compress the full thought process into a compact special token representation semantically aligned with the original CoT output. This compressed representation is then integrated into the input of the Hidden Chain-of-Thought (HCoT) model. The training process follows a two-stage procedure: First, the CoT model is optimized to generate the compressed token representations aligned with the ground-truth CoT outputs using a contrastive loss. Subsequently, with the CoT model parameters frozen, the HCoT model is fine-tuned to generate accurate subsequent predictions conditioned on the prefix instruction and the compressed CoT representations from the CoT model. Extensive experiments across three challenging domains - mathematical reasoning, agent invocation, and question answering - demonstrate that our semantic compression approach achieves competitive or improved performance compared to the full CoT baseline, while providing significant speedups of at least 1.5x in decoding time. Moreover, incorporating contrastive learning objectives further enhances the quality of the compressed representations, leading to better CoT prompting and improved task accuracy. Our work paves the way for more efficient exploitation of multi-step reasoning capabilities in LLMs across a wide range of applications.

Tianqiao Liu
Zui Chen
Zitao Liu
Mi Tian
Weiqi Luo


Self-Harmonized Chain of Thought

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated the capacity of large language models to perform complex reasoning through intermediate steps. While effective, current CoT methods face challenges: Zero-shot-CoT can lead to reasoning errors, and Few-shot-CoT requires labor-intensive manual demonstrations. Auto-CoT attempts to address these issues by automatically generating diverse demonstrations, but this diversity can lead to inconsistent reasoning patterns. We propose ECHO (Self-Harmonized Chain of Thought), a novel method that unifies diverse solution paths into a consistent and effective reasoning pattern. ECHO employs an iterative process to refine and harmonize automatically generated demonstrations, mitigating the limitations of existing approaches. Our comprehensive experiments across arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks demonstrate that ECHO outperforms Auto-CoT by an average of 2.8%. These findings suggest that ECHO represents a significant step towards more robust and generalizable automated reasoning in large language models.

North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics


Strategic Chain-of-Thought: Guiding Accurate Reasoning in LLMs through Strategy Elicitation

Abstract: The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has emerged as a critical approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, despite their widespread adoption and success, CoT methods often exhibit instability due to their inability to consistently ensure the quality of generated reasoning paths, leading to sub-optimal reasoning performance. To address this challenge, we propose the \textbf{Strategic Chain-of-Thought} (SCoT), a novel methodology designed to refine LLM performance by integrating strategic knowledge prior to generating intermediate reasoning steps. SCoT employs a two-stage approach within a single prompt: first eliciting an effective problem-solving strategy, which is then used to guide the generation of high-quality CoT paths and final answers. Our experiments across eight challenging reasoning datasets demonstrate significant improvements, including a 21.05\% increase on the GSM8K dataset and 24.13\% on the Tracking\_Objects dataset, respectively, using the Llama3-8b model. Additionally, we extend the SCoT framework to develop a few-shot method with automatically matched demonstrations, yielding even stronger results. These findings underscore the efficacy of SCoT, highlighting its potential to substantially enhance LLM performance in complex reasoning tasks.

Yu Wang
Shiwan Zhao
Zhihu Wang
Heyuan Huang
Ming Fan
Yubo Zhang
Zhixing Wang
Haijun Wang
Ting Liu


Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters

Abstract: Enabling LLMs to improve their outputs by using more test-time computation is a critical step towards building generally self-improving agents that can operate on open-ended natural language. In this paper, we study the scaling of inference-time computation in LLMs, with a focus on answering the question: if an LLM is allowed to use a fixed but non-trivial amount of inference-time compute, how much can it improve its performance on a challenging prompt? Answering this question has implications not only on the achievable performance of LLMs, but also on the future of LLM pretraining and how one should tradeoff inference-time and pre-training compute. Despite its importance, little research attempted to understand the scaling behaviors of various test-time inference methods. Moreover, current work largely provides negative results for a number of these strategies. In this work, we analyze two primary mechanisms to scale test-time computation: (1) searching against dense, process-based verifier reward models; and (2) updating the model's distribution over a response adaptively, given the prompt at test time. We find that in both cases, the effectiveness of different approaches to scaling test-time compute critically varies depending on the difficulty of the prompt. This observation motivates applying a "compute-optimal" scaling strategy, which acts to most effectively allocate test-time compute adaptively per prompt. Using this compute-optimal strategy, we can improve the efficiency of test-time compute scaling by more than 4x compared to a best-of-N baseline. Additionally, in a FLOPs-matched evaluation, we find that on problems where a smaller base model attains somewhat non-trivial success rates, test-time compute can be used to outperform a 14x larger model.

Charlie Snell
Jaehoon Lee
Kelvin Xu
Aviral Kumar


Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models

Abstract: While the scaling laws of large language models (LLMs) training have been extensively studied, optimal inference configurations of LLMs remain underexplored. We study inference scaling laws (aka test-time scaling laws) and compute-optimal inference, focusing on the trade-offs between model sizes and generating additional tokens with different inference strategies. As a first step towards understanding and designing compute-optimal inference methods, we studied cost-performance trade-offs for inference strategies such as greedy search, majority voting, best-of-$n$, weighted voting, and two different tree search algorithms, using different model sizes and compute budgets. Our findings suggest that scaling inference compute with inference strategies can be more computationally efficient than scaling model parameters. Additionally, smaller models combined with advanced inference algorithms offer Pareto-optimal trade-offs in cost and performance. For example, the Llemma-7B model, when paired with our novel tree search algorithm, consistently outperforms the Llemma-34B model across all tested inference strategies on the MATH benchmark. We hope these insights contribute to a deeper understanding of inference scaling laws (test-time scaling laws) for LLMs.

Yangzhen Wu
Zhiqing Sun
Shanda Li
Sean Welleck
Yiming Yang

International Conference on Learning Representations


Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: A key limitation of learned robot control policies is their inability to generalize outside their training data. Recent works on vision-language-action models (VLAs) have shown that the use of large, internet pre-trained vision-language models as the backbone of learned robot policies can substantially improve their robustness and generalization ability. Yet, one of the most exciting capabilities of large vision-language models in other domains is their ability to reason iteratively through complex problems. Can that same capability be brought into robotics to allow policies to improve performance by reasoning about a given task before acting? Naive use of "chain-of-thought" (CoT) style prompting is significantly less effective with standard VLAs because of the relatively simple training examples that are available to them. Additionally, purely semantic reasoning about sub-tasks, as is common in regular CoT, is insufficient for robot policies that need to ground their reasoning in sensory observations and the robot state. To this end, we introduce Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (ECoT) for VLAs, in which we train VLAs to perform multiple steps of reasoning about plans, sub-tasks, motions, and visually grounded features like object bounding boxes and end effector positions, before predicting the robot action. We design a scalable pipeline for generating synthetic training data for ECoT on large robot datasets. We demonstrate, that ECoT increases the absolute success rate of OpenVLA, the current strongest open-source VLA policy, by 28% across challenging generalization tasks, without any additional robot training data. Additionally, ECoT makes it easier for humans to interpret a policy's failures and correct its behavior using natural language.

Michał Zawalski
William Chen
Karl Pertsch
Oier Mees
Chelsea Finn
Sergey Levine


Chain-of-Thought Augmentation with Logit Contrast for Enhanced Reasoning in Language Models

Abstract: Rapidly increasing model scales coupled with steering methods such as chain-of-thought prompting have led to drastic improvements in language model reasoning. At the same time, models struggle with compositional generalization and are far from human performance on many reasoning-based benchmarks. Leveraging the success of chain-of-thought prompting, and also taking inspiration from context-aware decoding (CAD), we explore input-based contrasting methods to further encourage the type of reasoning induced by chain-of-thought prompting. While work remains to stabilize these results across datasets and models, the improvements we find warrant further investigation into input-based steering methods for context-aware reasoning.

Jay Shim
Grant Kruttschnitt
Alyssa Ma
Daniel Kim
Benjamin Chek
Athul Anand
Kevin Zhu
Sean O'Brien


Fine-Tuning on Diverse Reasoning Chains Drives Within-Inference CoT Refinement in LLMs

Abstract: Requiring a large language model (LLM) to generate intermediary reasoning steps, known as Chain of Thought (CoT), has been shown to be an effective way of boosting performance. Previous approaches have focused on generating multiple independent CoTs, combining them through ensembling or other post-hoc strategies to enhance reasoning. In this work, we introduce a novel approach where LLMs are fine-tuned to generate a sequence of Diverse Chains of Thought (DCoT) within a single inference step, which is fundamentally different from prior work that primarily operate on parallel CoT generations. DCoT allows LLMs to gain the ability to perform within-inference refinement of reasoning chains without requiring external feedback. Through a rigorous set of experiments spanning a wide range of tasks that require various reasoning types, we show that fine-tuning on DCoT improves performance over the CoT baseline across model families and scales (1.3B to 70B). These improvements are particularly impactful for tasks with a large result state space, such as those involving numeric answers. Our work is also significant because both quantitative analyses and manual evaluations reveal the observed gains stem from the models' ability to refine an initial reasoning chain by generating a second, improved chain within the same inference step, demonstrating previously elusive self-improvement. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/acl2025-diverse-cot.

Haritz Puerto
Tilek Chubakov
Xiaodan Zhu
Harish Tayyar Madabushi
Iryna Gurevych

Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics


On the Representational Capacity of Neural Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this improvement is that CoT reasoning extends an LM's computational power, as RNNs and transformers with additional scratch space are known to be Turing complete. Comparing LMs to Turing machines, however, introduces a category error - Turing machines decide language membership, whereas LMs define distributions over strings. To bridge this gap, we formalize CoT reasoning in a probabilistic setting. We present several results on the representational capacity of recurrent and transformer LMs with CoT reasoning, showing that they can represent the same family of distributions over strings as probabilistic Turing machines.

Franz Nowak
Anej Svete
Alexandra Butoi
Ryan Cotterell


LLMs as Models for Analogical Reasoning

Abstract: Analogical reasoning -- the capacity to identify and map structural relationships between different domains -- is fundamental to human cognition and learning. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) can sometimes match humans in analogical reasoning tasks, opening the possibility that analogical reasoning might emerge from domain-general processes. However, it is still debated whether these emergent capacities are largely superficial and limited to simple relations seen during training or whether they encompass the flexible representational and mapping capabilities which are the focus of leading cognitive models of analogy. In this study, we introduce novel analogical reasoning tasks that require participants to map between semantically contentful words and sequences of letters and other abstract characters. This task necessitates the ability to flexibly re-represent rich semantic information -- an ability which is known to be central to human analogy but which is thus far not well captured by existing cognitive theories and models. We assess the performance of both human participants and LLMs on tasks focusing on reasoning from semantic structure and semantic content, introducing variations that test the robustness of their analogical inferences. Advanced LLMs match human performance across several conditions, though humans and LLMs respond differently to certain task variations and semantic distractors. Our results thus provide new evidence that LLMs might offer a how-possibly explanation of human analogical reasoning in contexts that are not yet well modeled by existing theories, but that even today's best models are unlikely to yield how-actually explanations.

Sam Musker
Alex Duchnowski
Raphaël Millière
Ellie Pavlick


Chain of Preference Optimization: Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs

Abstract: The recent development of chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding has enabled large language models (LLMs) to generate explicit logical reasoning paths for complex problem-solving. However, research indicates that these paths are not always deliberate and optimal. The tree-of-thought (ToT) method employs tree-searching to extensively explore the reasoning space and find better reasoning paths that CoT decoding might overlook. This deliberation, however, comes at the cost of significantly increased inference complexity. In this work, we demonstrate that fine-tuning LLMs leveraging the search tree constructed by ToT allows CoT to achieve similar or better performance, thereby avoiding the substantial inference burden. This is achieved through Chain of Preference Optimization (CPO), where LLMs are fine-tuned to align each step of the CoT reasoning paths with those of ToT using the inherent preference information in the tree-search process. Extensive experimental results show that CPO significantly improves LLM performance in solving a variety of complex problems, including question answering, fact verification, and arithmetic reasoning, demonstrating its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/sail-sg/CPO.

Xuan Zhang
Chao Du
Tianyu Pang
Qian Liu
Wei Gao
Min Lin


FairCoT: Enhancing Fairness in Text-to-Image Generation via Chain of Thought Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models

Abstract: In the domain of text-to-image generative models, biases inherent in training datasets often propagate into generated content, posing significant ethical challenges, particularly in socially sensitive contexts. We introduce FairCoT, a novel framework that enhances fairness in text to image models through Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning within multimodal generative large language models. FairCoT employs iterative CoT refinement to systematically mitigate biases, and dynamically adjusts textual prompts in real time, ensuring diverse and equitable representation in generated images. By integrating iterative reasoning processes, FairCoT addresses the limitations of zero shot CoT in sensitive scenarios, balancing creativity with ethical responsibility. Experimental evaluations across popular text-to-image systems including DALLE and various Stable Diffusion variants, demonstrate that FairCoT significantly enhances fairness and diversity without sacrificing image quality or semantic fidelity. By combining robust reasoning, lightweight deployment, and extensibility to multiple models, FairCoT represents a promising step toward more socially responsible and transparent AI driven content generation.

Zahraa Al Sahili
Ioannis Patras
Matthew Purver

Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing


Buffer of Thoughts: Thought-Augmented Reasoning with Large Language Models

Abstract: We introduce Buffer of Thoughts (BoT), a novel and versatile thought-augmented reasoning approach for enhancing accuracy, efficiency and robustness of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we propose meta-buffer to store a series of informative high-level thoughts, namely thought-template, distilled from the problem-solving processes across various tasks. Then for each problem, we retrieve a relevant thought-template and adaptively instantiate it with specific reasoning structures to conduct efficient reasoning. To guarantee the scalability and stability, we further propose buffer-manager to dynamically update the meta-buffer, thus enhancing the capacity of meta-buffer as more tasks are solved. We conduct extensive experiments on 10 challenging reasoning-intensive tasks, and achieve significant performance improvements over previous SOTA methods: 11% on Game of 24, 20% on Geometric Shapes and 51% on Checkmate-in-One. Further analysis demonstrate the superior generalization ability and model robustness of our BoT, while requiring only 12% of the cost of multi-query prompting methods (e.g., tree/graph of thoughts) on average. Notably, we find that our Llama3-8B+BoT has the potential to surpass Llama3-70B model. Our project is available at: https://github.com/YangLing0818/buffer-of-thought-llm

Ling Yang
Zhaochen Yu
Tianjun Zhang
Shiyi Cao
Minkai Xu
Wentao Zhang
Joseph E. Gonzalez
Bin Cui


RATT: A Thought Structure for Coherent and Correct LLM Reasoning

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) gain substantial reasoning and decision-making capabilities from thought structures. However, existing methods such as Tree of Thought and Retrieval Augmented Thoughts often fall short in complex tasks due to the limitations of insufficient local retrieval of factual knowledge and inadequate global selection of strategies. These limitations make it challenging for these methods to balance factual accuracy and comprehensive logical optimization effectively. To address these limitations, we introduce the Retrieval Augmented Thought Tree (RATT), a novel thought structure that considers both overall logical soundness and factual correctness at each step of the thinking process. Specifically, at every point of a thought branch, RATT performs planning and lookahead to explore and evaluate multiple potential reasoning steps, and integrate the fact-checking ability of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with LLM's ability to assess overall strategy. Through this combination of factual knowledge and strategic feasibility, the RATT adjusts and integrates the thought tree structure to search for the most promising branches within the search space. This thought structure significantly enhances the model's coherence in logical inference and efficiency in decision-making, and thus increases the limit of the capacity of LLM to generate reliable inferences and decisions based on thought structures. A broad range of experiments on different types of tasks showcases that the RATT structure significantly outperforms existing methods in factual correctness and logical coherence.

Jinghan Zhang
Xiting Wang
Weijieying Ren
Lu Jiang
Dongjie Wang
Kunpeng Liu

AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence


Preemptive Answer "Attacks" on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) showcase impressive reasoning capabilities when coupled with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, the robustness of this approach warrants further investigation. In this paper, we introduce a novel scenario termed preemptive answers, where the LLM obtains an answer before engaging in reasoning. This situation can arise inadvertently or induced by malicious users by prompt injection attacks. Experiments reveal that preemptive answers significantly impair the model's reasoning capability across various CoT methods and a broad spectrum of datasets. To bolster the robustness of reasoning, we propose two measures aimed at mitigating this issue to some extent.


Faithful Logical Reasoning via Symbolic Chain-of-Thought

Abstract: While the recent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique enhances the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) with the theory of mind, it might still struggle in handling logical reasoning that relies much on symbolic expressions and rigid deducing rules. To strengthen the logical reasoning capability of LLMs, we propose a novel Symbolic Chain-of-Thought, namely SymbCoT, a fully LLM-based framework that integrates symbolic expressions and logic rules with CoT prompting. Technically, building upon an LLM, SymbCoT 1) first translates the natural language context into the symbolic format, and then 2) derives a step-by-step plan to solve the problem with symbolic logical rules, 3) followed by a verifier to check the translation and reasoning chain. Via thorough evaluations on 5 standard datasets with both First-Order Logic and Constraint Optimization symbolic expressions, SymbCoT shows striking improvements over the CoT method consistently, meanwhile refreshing the current state-of-the-art performances. We further demonstrate that our system advances in more faithful, flexible, and explainable logical reasoning. To our knowledge, this is the first to combine symbolic expressions and rules into CoT for logical reasoning with LLMs. Code is open at https://github.com/Aiden0526/SymbCoT.

Jundong Xu
Hao Fei
Liangming Pan
Qian Liu
Mong-Li Lee
Wynne Hsu


Enhancing Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models via Reasoning Patterns

Abstract: Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised CoT methods primarily select examples based on the semantics of the questions, which can introduce noise and lack interpretability. In this paper, we propose leveraging reasoning patterns to enhance CoT prompting effectiveness. Reasoning patterns represent the process by which language models arrive at their final results. By utilizing prior knowledge and prompt-based methods from large models, we first construct task-specific pattern sets. We then select diverse demonstrations based on different reasoning patterns. This approach not only mitigates the impact of noise but also provides explicit interpretability to help us understand the mechanisms of CoT. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method is more robust and consistently leads to improvements across various reasoning tasks.

Yufeng Zhang
Xuepeng Wang
Lingxiang Wu
Jinqiao Wang


Mitigating Misleading Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Selective Filtering

Abstract: Large language models have manifested remarkable capabilities by leveraging chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning techniques to solve intricate questions through step-by-step reasoning chains. Despite its success, the efficacy of such reasoning is inherently contingent upon the quality of CoT. However, flawless CoT reasoning cannot be guaranteed due to the presence of indecomposable questions and the potential for erroneous reasoning chains, particularly in the case of small-scale language models. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel approach called the selective filtering reasoner (SelF-Reasoner) that assesses the entailment relationship between the question and the candidate reasoning chain. Then, we proceed with CoT reasoning when the reasoning chain demonstrates confidence; otherwise, we opt to predict the answer directly. SelF-Reasoner improves the fine-tuned T5 baseline consistently over the ScienceQA, ECQA, and LastLetter tasks. Code is available at \texttt{https://github.com/LibroWu/SelF-Reasoner}.

International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation


DriveCoT: Integrating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with End-to-End Driving

Abstract: End-to-end driving has made significant progress in recent years, demonstrating benefits such as system simplicity and competitive driving performance under both open-loop and closed-loop settings. Nevertheless, the lack of interpretability and controllability in its driving decisions hinders real-world deployment for end-to-end driving systems. In this paper, we collect a comprehensive end-to-end driving dataset named DriveCoT, leveraging the CARLA simulator. It contains sensor data, control decisions, and chain-of-thought labels to indicate the reasoning process. We utilize the challenging driving scenarios from the CARLA leaderboard 2.0, which involve high-speed driving and lane-changing, and propose a rule-based expert policy to control the vehicle and generate ground truth labels for its reasoning process across different driving aspects and the final decisions. This dataset can serve as an open-loop end-to-end driving benchmark, enabling the evaluation of accuracy in various chain-of-thought aspects and the final decision. In addition, we propose a baseline model called DriveCoT-Agent, trained on our dataset, to generate chain-of-thought predictions and final decisions. The trained model exhibits strong performance in both open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed dataset.

Tianqi Wang
Enze Xie
Ruihang Chu
Zhenguo Li
Ping Luo


Markov chain models for inspecting response dynamics in psychological testing

Abstract: The importance of considering contextual probabilities in shaping response patterns within psychological testing is underscored, despite the ubiquitous nature of order effects discussed extensively in methodological literature. Drawing from concepts such as path-dependency, first-order autocorrelation, state-dependency, and hysteresis, the present study is an attempt to address how earlier responses serve as an anchor for subsequent answers in tests, surveys, and questionnaires. Introducing the notion of non-commuting observables derived from quantum physics, I highlight their role in characterizing psychological processes and the impact of measurement instruments on participants' responses. We advocate for the utilization of first-order Markov chain modeling to capture and forecast sequential dependencies in survey and test responses. The employment of the first-order Markov chain model lies in individuals' propensity to exhibit partial focus to preceding responses, with recent items most likely exerting a substantial influence on subsequent response selection. This study contributes to advancing our understanding of the dynamics inherent in sequential data within psychological research and provides a methodological framework for conducting longitudinal analyses of response patterns of test and questionnaire.


Chain-of-Spot: Interactive Reasoning Improves Large Vision-Language Models

Abstract: In the realm of vision-language understanding, the proficiency of models in interpreting and reasoning over visual content has become a cornerstone for numerous applications. However, it is challenging for the visual encoder in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) to extract useful features tailored to questions that aid the language model's response. Furthermore, a common practice among existing LVLMs is to utilize lower-resolution images, which restricts the ability for visual recognition. Our work introduces the Chain-of-Spot (CoS) method, which we describe as Interactive Reasoning, a novel approach that enhances feature extraction by focusing on key regions of interest (ROI) within the image, corresponding to the posed questions or instructions. This technique allows LVLMs to access more detailed visual information without altering the original image resolution, thereby offering multi-granularity image features. By integrating Chain-of-Spot with instruct-following LLaVA-1.5 models, the process of image reasoning consistently improves performance across a wide range of multimodal datasets and benchmarks without bells and whistles and achieves new state-of-the-art results. Our empirical findings demonstrate a significant improvement in LVLMs' ability to understand and reason about visual content, paving the way for more sophisticated visual instruction-following applications. Code and models are available at https://github.com/dongyh20/Chain-of-Spot

Zuyan Liu
Yuhao Dong
Yongming Rao
Jie Zhou
Jiwen Lu


Stop Reasoning! When Multimodal LLM with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Meets Adversarial Image

Abstract: Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with a great ability of text and image understanding have received great attention. To achieve better reasoning with MLLMs, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely explored, which further promotes MLLMs' explainability by giving intermediate reasoning steps. Despite the strong power demonstrated by MLLMs in multimodal reasoning, recent studies show that MLLMs still suffer from adversarial images. This raises the following open questions: Does CoT also enhance the adversarial robustness of MLLMs? What do the intermediate reasoning steps of CoT entail under adversarial attacks? To answer these questions, we first generalize existing attacks to CoT-based inferences by attacking the two main components, i.e., rationale and answer. We find that CoT indeed improves MLLMs' adversarial robustness against the existing attack methods by leveraging the multi-step reasoning process, but not substantially. Based on our findings, we further propose a novel attack method, termed as stop-reasoning attack, that attacks the model while bypassing the CoT reasoning process. Experiments on three MLLMs and two visual reasoning datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed method. We show that stop-reasoning attack can result in misled predictions and outperform baseline attacks by a significant margin.

Zefeng Wang
Zhen Han
Shuo Chen
Fan Xue
Zifeng Ding
Xun Xiao
Volker Tresp
Philip Torr
Jindong Gu


Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Without Prompting

Abstract: In enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), prior research primarily focuses on specific prompting techniques such as few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. These methods, while effective, often involve manually intensive prompt engineering. Our study takes a novel approach by asking: Can LLMs reason effectively without prompting? Our findings reveal that, intriguingly, CoT reasoning paths can be elicited from pre-trained LLMs by simply altering the \textit{decoding} process. Rather than conventional greedy decoding, we investigate the top-$k$ alternative tokens, uncovering that CoT paths are frequently inherent in these sequences. This approach not only bypasses the confounders of prompting but also allows us to assess the LLMs' \textit{intrinsic} reasoning abilities. Moreover, we observe that the presence of a CoT in the decoding path correlates with a higher confidence in the model's decoded answer. This confidence metric effectively differentiates between CoT and non-CoT paths. Extensive empirical studies on various reasoning benchmarks show that the proposed CoT-decoding effectively elicits reasoning capabilities from language models, which were previously obscured by standard greedy decoding.


Medical Image Segmentation with InTEnt: Integrated Entropy Weighting for Single Image Test-Time Adaptation

Abstract: Test-time adaptation (TTA) refers to adapting a trained model to a new domain during testing. Existing TTA techniques rely on having multiple test images from the same domain, yet this may be impractical in real-world applications such as medical imaging, where data acquisition is expensive and imaging conditions vary frequently. Here, we approach such a task, of adapting a medical image segmentation model with only a single unlabeled test image. Most TTA approaches, which directly minimize the entropy of predictions, fail to improve performance significantly in this setting, in which we also observe the choice of batch normalization (BN) layer statistics to be a highly important yet unstable factor due to only having a single test domain example. To overcome this, we propose to instead integrate over predictions made with various estimates of target domain statistics between the training and test statistics, weighted based on their entropy statistics. Our method, validated on 24 source/target domain splits across 3 medical image datasets surpasses the leading method by 2.9% Dice coefficient on average.

Haoyu Dong
Nicholas Konz
Hanxue Gu
Maciej A. Mazurowski


Diffusion of Thoughts: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Diffusion Language Models

Abstract: Recently, diffusion models have garnered significant interest in the field of text processing due to their many potential advantages compared to conventional autoregressive models. In this work, we propose Diffusion-of-Thought (DoT), a novel approach that integrates diffusion models with Chain-of-Thought, a well-established technique for improving the reasoning ability of autoregressive language models. In contrast to autoregressive language models that make decisions in a left-to-right, token-by-token manner, DoT allows reasoning steps to diffuse over time through a diffusion language model and offers greater flexibility in trading-off computation for reasoning performance. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of DoT in multi-digit multiplication, boolean logic, and grade school math problems, with a small diffusion model outperforming a much larger autoregressive model in both efficiency and accuracy. In addition to that, DoT showcases promising self-correction abilities and benefits from existing reasoning-enhancing techniques like self-consistency decoding. Our findings contribute to the understanding and development of reasoning with diffusion language models.

Jiacheng Ye
Shansan Gong
Liheng Chen
Lin Zheng
Jiahui Gao
Han Shi
Chuan Wu
Xin Jiang
Zhenguo Li
Wei Bi
Lingpeng Kong


A Chain-of-Thought Is as Strong as Its Weakest Link: A Benchmark for Verifiers of Reasoning Chains

Abstract: Prompting language models to provide step-by-step answers (e.g., "Chain-of-Thought") is the prominent approach for complex reasoning tasks, where more accurate reasoning chains typically improve downstream task performance. Recent literature discusses automatic methods to verify reasoning to evaluate and improve their correctness. However, no fine-grained step-level datasets are available to enable thorough evaluation of such verification methods, hindering progress in this direction. We introduce REVEAL: Reasoning Verification Evaluation, a dataset to benchmark automatic verifiers of complex Chain-of-Thought reasoning in open-domain question-answering settings. REVEAL includes comprehensive labels for the relevance, attribution to evidence passages, and logical correctness of each reasoning step in a language model's answer, across a variety of datasets and state-of-the-art language models. Evaluation on REVEAL shows that verifiers struggle at verifying reasoning chains - in particular, verifying logical correctness and detecting contradictions. Available at https://reveal-dataset.github.io/ .

Alon Jacovi
Yonatan Bitton
Bernd Bohnet
Jonathan Herzig
Or Honovich
Michael Tseng
Michael Collins
Roee Aharoni
Mor Geva


Deductive Beam Search: Decoding Deducible Rationale for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: Recent advancements have significantly augmented the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through various methodologies, especially chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, previous methods fail to address reasoning errors in intermediate steps, leading to accumulative errors. In this paper, we propose Deductive Beam Search (DBS), which seamlessly integrates CoT and deductive reasoning with step-wise beam search for LLMs. Our approach deploys a verifier, verifying the deducibility of a reasoning step and its premises, thus alleviating the error accumulation. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable and labor-free data construction method to amplify our model's verification capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the base performance of LLMs of various scales (7B, 13B, 70B, and ChatGPT) across 8 reasoning datasets from 3 diverse reasoning genres, including arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic. Moreover, our analysis proves DBS's capability of detecting diverse and subtle reasoning errors and robustness on different model scales.


Efficient Tool Use with Chain-of-Abstraction Reasoning

Abstract: To achieve faithful reasoning that aligns with human expectations, large language models (LLMs) need to ground their reasoning to real-world knowledge (e.g., web facts, math and physical rules). Tools help LLMs access this external knowledge, but there remains challenges for fine-tuning LLM agents (e.g., Toolformer) to invoke tools in multi-step reasoning problems, where inter-connected tool calls require holistic and efficient tool usage planning. In this work, we propose a new method for LLMs to better leverage tools in multi-step reasoning. Our method, Chain-of-Abstraction (CoA), trains LLMs to first decode reasoning chains with abstract placeholders, and then call domain tools to reify each reasoning chain by filling in specific knowledge. This planning with abstract chains enables LLMs to learn more general reasoning strategies, which are robust to shifts of domain knowledge (e.g., math results) relevant to different reasoning questions. It also allows LLMs to perform decoding and calling of external tools in parallel, which avoids the inference delay caused by waiting for tool responses. In mathematical reasoning and Wiki QA domains, we show that our method consistently outperforms previous chain-of-thought and tool-augmented baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets, with an average ~6% absolute QA accuracy improvement. LLM agents trained with our method also show more efficient tool use, with inference speed being on average ~1.4x faster than baseline tool-augmented LLMs.

Silin Gao
Jane Dwivedi-Yu
Ping Yu
Xiaoqing Ellen Tan
Ramakanth Pasunuru
Olga Golovneva
Koustuv Sinha
Asli Celikyilmaz
Antoine Bosselut
Tianlu Wang

International Conference on Computational Linguistics


KAM-CoT: Knowledge Augmented Multimodal Chain-of-Thoughts Reasoning

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in natural language processing tasks by leveraging chain of thought (CoT) that enables step-by-step thinking. Extending LLMs with multimodal capabilities is the recent interest, but incurs computational cost and requires substantial hardware resources. To address these challenges, we propose KAM-CoT a framework that integrates CoT reasoning, Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and multiple modalities for a comprehensive understanding of multimodal tasks. KAM-CoT adopts a two-stage training process with KG grounding to generate effective rationales and answers. By incorporating external knowledge from KGs during reasoning, the model gains a deeper contextual understanding reducing hallucinations and enhancing the quality of answers. This knowledge-augmented CoT reasoning empowers the model to handle questions requiring external context, providing more informed answers. Experimental findings show KAM-CoT outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. On the ScienceQA dataset, we achieve an average accuracy of 93.87%, surpassing GPT-3.5 (75.17%) by 18% and GPT-4 (83.99%) by 10%. Remarkably, KAM-CoT achieves these results with only 280M trainable parameters at a time, demonstrating its cost-efficiency and effectiveness.

Debjyoti Mondal
Suraj Modi
Subhadarshi Panda
Rituraj Singh
Godawari Sudhakar Rao


Code Prompting Elicits Conditional Reasoning Abilities in Text+Code LLMs

Abstract: Reasoning is a fundamental component of language understanding. Recent prompting techniques, such as chain of thought, have consistently improved LLMs' performance on various reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, there is still little understanding of what triggers reasoning abilities in LLMs in the inference stage. In this paper, we introduce code prompting, a chain of prompts that transforms a natural language problem into code and directly prompts the LLM using the generated code without resorting to external code execution. We hypothesize that code prompts can elicit certain reasoning capabilities of LLMs trained on text and code and utilize the proposed method to improve conditional reasoning, the ability to infer different conclusions depending on the fulfillment of certain conditions. We find that code prompting exhibits a high-performance boost for multiple LLMs (up to 22.52 percentage points on GPT 3.5, 7.75 on Mixtral, and 16.78 on Mistral) across multiple conditional reasoning datasets. We then conduct comprehensive experiments to understand how code prompts trigger reasoning abilities and which capabilities are elicited in the underlying models. Our analysis of GPT 3.5 reveals that the code formatting of the input problem is essential for performance improvement. Furthermore, code prompts improve sample efficiency of in-context learning and facilitate state tracking of variables or entities.

Haritz Puerto
Martin Tutek
Somak Aditya
Xiaodan Zhu
Iryna Gurevych


Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding

Abstract: Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a promising direction to tackle many table understanding tasks, such as table-based question answering and fact verification. Compared with generic reasoning, table-based reasoning requires the extraction of underlying semantics from both free-form questions and semi-structured tabular data. Chain-of-Thought and its similar approaches incorporate the reasoning chain in the form of textual context, but it is still an open question how to effectively leverage tabular data in the reasoning chain. We propose the Chain-of-Table framework, where tabular data is explicitly used in the reasoning chain as a proxy for intermediate thoughts. Specifically, we guide LLMs using in-context learning to iteratively generate operations and update the table to represent a tabular reasoning chain. LLMs can therefore dynamically plan the next operation based on the results of the previous ones. This continuous evolution of the table forms a chain, showing the reasoning process for a given tabular problem. The chain carries structured information of the intermediate results, enabling more accurate and reliable predictions. Chain-of-Table achieves new state-of-the-art performance on WikiTQ, FeTaQA, and TabFact benchmarks across multiple LLM choices.

Zilong Wang
Hao Zhang
Chun-Liang Li
Julian Martin Eisenschlos
Vincent Perot
Zifeng Wang
Lesly Miculicich
Yasuhisa Fujii
Jingbo Shang
Chen-Yu Lee
Tomas Pfister


A Survey of Reasoning with Foundation Models

Abstract: Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.

Jiankai Sun
Chuanyang Zheng
Enze Xie
Zhengying Liu
Ruihang Chu
Jianing Qiu
Jiaqi Xu
Mingyu Ding
Hongyang Li
Mengzhe Geng
Yue Wu
Wenhai Wang
Junsong Chen
Zhangyue Yin
Xiaozhe Ren
Jie Fu
Junxian He
Wu Yuan
Qi Liu
Xihui Liu
Yu Li
Hao Dong
Yu Cheng
Ming Zhang
Pheng Ann Heng
Jifeng Dai
Ping Luo
Jingdong Wang
Ji-Rong Wen
Xipeng Qiu
Yike Guo
Hui Xiong
Qun Liu
Zhenguo Li


ThinkBot: Embodied Instruction Following with Thought Chain Reasoning

Abstract: Embodied Instruction Following (EIF) requires agents to complete human instruction by interacting objects in complicated surrounding environments. Conventional methods directly consider the sparse human instruction to generate action plans for agents, which usually fail to achieve human goals because of the instruction incoherence in action descriptions. On the contrary, we propose ThinkBot that reasons the thought chain in human instruction to recover the missing action descriptions, so that the agent can successfully complete human goals by following the coherent instruction. Specifically, we first design an instruction completer based on large language models to recover the missing actions with interacted objects between consecutive human instruction, where the perceived surrounding environments and the completed sub-goals are considered for instruction completion. Based on the partially observed scene semantic maps, we present an object localizer to infer the position of interacted objects for agents to achieve complex human goals. Extensive experiments in the simulated environment show that our ThinkBot outperforms the state-of-the-art EIF methods by a sizable margin in both success rate and execution efficiency.

Guanxing Lu
Ziwei Wang
Changliu Liu
Jiwen Lu
Yansong Tang


Chain of Code: Reasoning with a Language Model-Augmented Code Emulator

Abstract: Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter - we hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve Chain of Thought reasoning not only for logic and arithmetic tasks, but also for semantic ones (and in particular, those that are a mix of both). For example, consider prompting an LM to write code that counts the number of times it detects sarcasm in an essay: the LM may struggle to write an implementation for "detect_sarcasm(string)" that can be executed by the interpreter (handling the edge cases would be insurmountable). However, LMs may still produce a valid solution if they not only write code, but also selectively "emulate" the interpreter by generating the expected output of "detect_sarcasm(string)". In this work, we propose Chain of Code (CoC), a simple yet surprisingly effective extension that improves LM code-driven reasoning. The key idea is to encourage LMs to format semantic sub-tasks in a program as flexible pseudocode that the interpreter can explicitly catch undefined behaviors and hand off to simulate with an LM (as an "LMulator"). Experiments demonstrate that Chain of Code outperforms Chain of Thought and other baselines across a variety of benchmarks; on BIG-Bench Hard, Chain of Code achieves 84%, a gain of 12% over Chain of Thought. In a nutshell, CoC broadens the scope of reasoning questions that LMs can answer by "thinking in code".

Chengshu Li
Jacky Liang
Andy Zeng
Xinyun Chen
Karol Hausman
Dorsa Sadigh
Sergey Levine
Li Fei-Fei
Fei Xia
Brian Ichter

International Conference on Machine Learning


LaRS: Latent Reasoning Skills for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a popular in-context learning (ICL) approach for large language models (LLMs), especially when tackling complex reasoning tasks. Traditional ICL approaches construct prompts using examples that contain questions similar to the input question. However, CoT prompting, which includes crucial intermediate reasoning steps (rationales) within its examples, necessitates selecting examples based on these rationales rather than the questions themselves. Existing methods require human experts or pre-trained LLMs to describe the skill, a high-level abstraction of rationales, to guide the selection. These methods, however, are often costly and difficult to scale. Instead, this paper introduces a new approach named Latent Reasoning Skills (LaRS) that employs unsupervised learning to create a latent space representation of rationales, with a latent variable called a reasoning skill. Concurrently, LaRS learns a reasoning policy to determine the required reasoning skill for a given question. Then the ICL examples are selected by aligning the reasoning skills between past examples and the question. This approach is theoretically grounded and compute-efficient, eliminating the need for auxiliary LLM inference or manual prompt design. Empirical results demonstrate that LaRS consistently outperforms SOTA skill-based selection methods, processing example banks four times faster, reducing LLM inferences during the selection stage by half, and showing greater robustness to sub-optimal example banks.

Zifan Xu
Haozhu Wang
Dmitriy Bespalov
Xian Wu
Peter Stone
Yanjun Qi


Retrieval-augmented Multi-modal Chain-of-Thoughts Reasoning for Large Language Models

Abstract: The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought substantial attention to the Chain of Thought (CoT) approach, primarily due to its ability to enhance the capability of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. Moreover, the significance of CoT approaches extends to the application of LLMs for multi-modal tasks. However, the selection of optimal CoT demonstration examples in multi-modal reasoning remains less explored for LLMs due to the inherent complexity of multi-modal examples. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that addresses this challenge by using retrieval mechanisms to dynamically and automatically select demonstration examples based on cross-modal and intra-modal similarities. Furthermore, we employ a Stratified Sampling method of categorising demonstration examples into groups based on their types and then retrieving examples from different groups respectively to promote the diversity of demonstration examples. Through a series of experiments on two popular benchmark datasets: ScienceQA and MathVista, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the performance of GPT-4 by 6% on ScienceQA and 12.9% on MathVista, and enhances the performance of GPT-4V on two datasets by 2.7%, substantially improving the performance of the most advanced LLMs and LMMs for complex multi-modal reasoning tasks.

Bingshuai Liu
Chenyang Lyu
Zijun Min
Zhanyu Wang
Jinsong Su
Longyue Wang

IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Network


Contrastive Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Abstract: Despite the success of chain of thought in enhancing language model reasoning, the underlying process remains less well understood. Although logically sound reasoning appears inherently crucial for chain of thought, prior studies surprisingly reveal minimal impact when using invalid demonstrations instead. Furthermore, the conventional chain of thought does not inform language models on what mistakes to avoid, which potentially leads to more errors. Hence, inspired by how humans can learn from both positive and negative examples, we propose contrastive chain of thought to enhance language model reasoning. Compared to the conventional chain of thought, our approach provides both valid and invalid reasoning demonstrations, to guide the model to reason step-by-step while reducing reasoning mistakes. To improve generalization, we introduce an automatic method to construct contrastive demonstrations. Our experiments on reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that contrastive chain of thought can serve as a general enhancement of chain-of-thought prompting.

Yew Ken Chia
Guizhen Chen
Luu Anh Tuan
Soujanya Poria
Lidong Bing


The Role of Chain-of-Thought in Complex Vision-Language Reasoning Task

Abstract: The study explores the effectiveness of the Chain-of-Thought approach, known for its proficiency in language tasks by breaking them down into sub-tasks and intermediate steps, in improving vision-language tasks that demand sophisticated perception and reasoning. We present the "Description then Decision" strategy, which is inspired by how humans process signals. This strategy significantly improves probing task performance by 50%, establishing the groundwork for future research on reasoning paradigms in complex vision-language tasks.

Yifan Wu
Pengchuan Zhang
Wenhan Xiong
Barlas Oguz
James C. Gee
Yixin Nie


Chain of Thought with Explicit Evidence Reasoning for Few-shot Relation Extraction

Abstract: Few-shot relation extraction involves identifying the type of relationship between two specific entities within a text, using a limited number of annotated samples. A variety of solutions to this problem have emerged by applying meta-learning and neural graph techniques which typically necessitate a training process for adaptation. Recently, the strategy of in-context learning has been demonstrating notable results without the need of training. Few studies have already utilized in-context learning for zero-shot information extraction. Unfortunately, the evidence for inference is either not considered or implicitly modeled during the construction of chain-of-thought prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for few-shot relation extraction using large language models, named CoT-ER, chain-of-thought with explicit evidence reasoning. In particular, CoT-ER first induces large language models to generate evidences using task-specific and concept-level knowledge. Then these evidences are explicitly incorporated into chain-of-thought prompting for relation extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that our CoT-ER approach (with 0% training data) achieves competitive performance compared to the fully-supervised (with 100% training data) state-of-the-art approach on the FewRel1.0 and FewRel2.0 datasets.


Implicit Chain of Thought Reasoning via Knowledge Distillation

Abstract: To augment language models with the ability to reason, researchers usually prompt or finetune them to produce chain of thought reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, although people use natural language to reason effectively, it may be that LMs could reason more effectively with some intermediate computation that is not in natural language. In this work, we explore an alternative reasoning approach: instead of explicitly producing the chain of thought reasoning steps, we use the language model's internal hidden states to perform implicit reasoning. The implicit reasoning steps are distilled from a teacher model trained on explicit chain-of-thought reasoning, and instead of doing reasoning "horizontally" by producing intermediate words one-by-one, we distill it such that the reasoning happens "vertically" among the hidden states in different layers. We conduct experiments on a multi-digit multiplication task and a grade school math problem dataset and find that this approach enables solving tasks previously not solvable without explicit chain-of-thought, at a speed comparable to no chain-of-thought.

Yuntian Deng
Kiran Prasad
Roland Fernandez
Paul Smolensky
Vishrav Chaudhary
Stuart Shieber


DDCoT: Duty-Distinct Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multimodal Reasoning in Language Models

Abstract: A long-standing goal of AI systems is to perform complex multimodal reasoning like humans. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable strides in such multi-step reasoning on the language modality solely by leveraging the chain of thought (CoT) to mimic human thinking. However, the transfer of these advancements to multimodal contexts introduces heightened challenges, including but not limited to the impractical need for labor-intensive annotation and the limitations in terms of flexibility, generalizability, and explainability. To evoke CoT reasoning in multimodality, this work first conducts an in-depth analysis of these challenges posed by multimodality and presents two key insights: "keeping critical thinking" and "letting everyone do their jobs" in multimodal CoT reasoning. Furthermore, this study proposes a novel DDCoT prompting that maintains a critical attitude through negative-space prompting and incorporates multimodality into reasoning by first dividing the reasoning responsibility of LLMs into reasoning and recognition and then integrating the visual recognition capability of visual models into the joint reasoning process. The rationales generated by DDCoT not only improve the reasoning abilities of both large and small language models in zero-shot prompting and fine-tuning learning, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods but also exhibit impressive generalizability and explainability.

Ge Zheng
Bin Yang
Jiajin Tang
Hong-Yu Zhou
Sibei Yang


MuSR: Testing the Limits of Chain-of-thought with Multistep Soft Reasoning

Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) equipped with techniques like chain-of-thought prompting have demonstrated impressive capabilities, they still fall short in their ability to reason robustly in complex settings. However, evaluating LLM reasoning is challenging because system capabilities continue to grow while benchmark datasets for tasks like logical deduction have remained static. We introduce MuSR, a dataset for evaluating language models on multistep soft reasoning tasks specified in a natural language narrative. This dataset has two crucial features. First, it is created through a novel neurosymbolic synthetic-to-natural generation algorithm, enabling the construction of complex reasoning instances that challenge GPT-4 (e.g., murder mysteries roughly 1000 words in length) and which can be scaled further as more capable LLMs are released. Second, our dataset instances are free text narratives corresponding to real-world domains of reasoning; this makes it simultaneously much more challenging than other synthetically-crafted benchmarks while remaining realistic and tractable for human annotators to solve with high accuracy. We evaluate a range of LLMs and prompting techniques on this dataset and characterize the gaps that remain for techniques like chain-of-thought to perform robust reasoning.

Zayne Sprague
Xi Ye
Kaj Bostrom
Swarat Chaudhuri
Greg Durrett


Cross-lingual Prompting: Improving Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning across Languages

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) is capable of eliciting models to explicitly generate reasoning paths, thus promoting reasoning accuracy and attracting increasing attention. Specifically, zero-shot CoT achieves remarkable improvements in a wide range of reasoning tasks by simply instructing the LLM with the prompt "Let's think step by step!". Despite the success of zero-shot CoT, the existing zero-shot prompting techniques remain limited to a single language, making it challenging to generalize to other languages and hindering global development. In this work, we introduce cross-lingual prompting (CLP), aiming to improve zero-shot CoT reasoning across languages. Specifically, CLP consists of two main components: (1) cross-lingual alignment prompting and (2) task-specific solver prompting. The cross-lingual alignment prompting is responsible for aligning representations across different languages, whereas the task-specific solver prompting is used to generate the final chain of thoughts and results for the reasoning task. In addition, we further introduce cross-lingual self-consistent prompting (CLSP) to ensemble different reasoning paths across languages. Our experimental evaluations on several benchmarks demonstrate that CLP and CLSP significantly outperform the existing prompting methods and achieve state-of-the-art performance. We hope this work will inspire further breakthroughs in cross-lingual CoT.

Libo Qin
Qiguang Chen
Fuxuan Wei
Shijue Huang
Wanxiang Che


Plan, Verify and Switch: Integrated Reasoning with Diverse X-of-Thoughts

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) have shown effectiveness with different prompting methods, such as Chain of Thought, Program of Thought, we find that these methods have formed a great complementarity to each other on math reasoning tasks. In this work, we propose XoT, an integrated problem solving framework by prompting LLMs with diverse reasoning thoughts. For each question, XoT always begins with selecting the most suitable method then executes each method iteratively. Within each iteration, XoT actively checks the validity of the generated answer and incorporates the feedback from external executors, allowing it to dynamically switch among different prompting methods. Through extensive experiments on 10 popular math reasoning datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach and thoroughly analyze the strengths of each module. Moreover, empirical results suggest that our framework is orthogonal to recent work that makes improvements on single reasoning methods and can further generalise to logical reasoning domain. By allowing method switching, XoT provides a fresh perspective on the collaborative integration of diverse reasoning thoughts in a unified framework. The code is available at https://github.com/tengxiaoliu/XoT.

Tengxiao Liu
Qipeng Guo
Yuqing Yang
Xiangkun Hu
Yue Zhang
Xipeng Qiu
Zheng Zhang


Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought on Large Language Models for Open-domain Multi-hop Reasoning

Abstract: In open-domain question-answering (ODQA), most existing questions require single-hop reasoning on commonsense. To further extend this task, we officially introduce open-domain multi-hop reasoning (ODMR) by answering multi-hop questions with explicit reasoning steps in open-domain setting. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have found significant utility in facilitating ODQA without external corpus. Furthermore, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts the reasoning capability of LLMs to a greater extent with manual or automated paradigms. However, existing automated methods lack of quality assurance, while manual approaches suffer from limited scalability and poor diversity, hindering the capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we propose Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought (SP-CoT), an automated framework to mass-produce high quality CoTs of LLMs, by LLMs and for LLMs. SP-CoT introduces an automated generation pipeline of high quality ODMR datasets, an adaptive sampler for in-context CoT selection and self-prompted inference via in-context learning. Extensive experiments on four multi-hop question-answering benchmarks show that our proposed SP-CoT not only significantly surpasses the previous SOTA methods on large-scale (175B) LLMs, but also nearly doubles the zero-shot performance of small-scale (13B) LLMs. Further analysis reveals the remarkable capability of SP-CoT to elicit direct and concise intermediate reasoning steps by recalling $\sim$50\% of intermediate answers on MuSiQue-Ans dataset.


The Expressive Power of Transformers with Chain of Thought

Abstract: Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer immediately after reading their input. However, in practice, transformers' reasoning can be improved by allowing them to use a "chain of thought" or "scratchpad", i.e., generate and condition on a sequence of intermediate tokens before answering. Motivated by this, we ask: Does such intermediate generation fundamentally extend the computational power of a decoder-only transformer? We show that the answer is yes, but the amount of increase depends crucially on the amount of intermediate generation. For instance, we find that transformer decoders with a logarithmic number of decoding steps (w.r.t. the input length) push the limits of standard transformers only slightly, while a linear number of decoding steps, assuming projected pre-norm (a slight generalization of standard pre-norm), adds a clear new ability (under standard complexity conjectures): recognizing all regular languages. Our results also imply that linear steps keep transformer decoders within context-sensitive languages, and polynomial steps with generalized pre-norm make them recognize exactly the class of polynomial-time solvable problems -- the first exact characterization of a type of transformers in terms of standard complexity classes. Together, this provides a nuanced framework for understanding how the length of a transformer's chain of thought or scratchpad impacts its reasoning power.


Navigate through Enigmatic Labyrinth A Survey of Chain of Thought Reasoning: Advances, Frontiers and Future

Abstract: Reasoning, a fundamental cognitive process integral to human intelligence, has garnered substantial interest within artificial intelligence. Notably, recent studies have revealed that chain-of-thought prompting significantly enhances LLM's reasoning capabilities, which attracts widespread attention from both academics and industry. In this paper, we systematically investigate relevant research, summarizing advanced methods through a meticulous taxonomy that offers novel perspectives. Moreover, we delve into the current frontiers and delineate the challenges and future directions, thereby shedding light on future research. Furthermore, we engage in a discussion about open questions. We hope this paper serves as an introduction for beginners and fosters future research. Resources have been made publicly available at https://github.com/zchuz/CoT-Reasoning-Survey

Zheng Chu
Jingchang Chen
Qianglong Chen
Weijiang Yu
Tao He
Haotian Wang
Weihua Peng
Ming Liu
Bing Qin
Ting Liu


Enhancing Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models through Logic

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models have showcased their remarkable generalizability across various domains. However, their reasoning abilities still have significant room for improvement, especially when confronted with scenarios requiring multi-step reasoning. Although large language models possess extensive knowledge, their reasoning often fails to effectively utilize this knowledge to establish a coherent thinking paradigm. These models sometimes show hallucinations as their reasoning procedures are unconstrained by logical principles. Aiming at improving the zero-shot chain-of-thought reasoning ability of large language models, we propose LoT (Logical Thoughts), a self-improvement prompting framework that leverages principles rooted in symbolic logic, particularly Reductio ad Absurdum, to systematically verify and rectify the reasoning processes step by step. Experimental evaluations conducted on language tasks in diverse domains, including arithmetic, commonsense, symbolic, causal inference, and social problems, demonstrate the efficacy of enhanced reasoning by logic. The implementation code for LoT can be accessed at: https://github.com/xf-zhao/LoT.

Xufeng Zhao
Mengdi Li
Wenhao Lu
Cornelius Weber
Jae Hee Lee
Kun Chu
Stefan Wermter


Chain-of-Thought Reasoning is a Policy Improvement Operator

Abstract: Large language models have astounded the world with fascinating new capabilities. However, they currently lack the ability to teach themselves new skills, relying instead on large amounts of human-generated training data. We introduce SECToR (Self-Education via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning), a proof-of-concept demonstration that language models can teach themselves new skills using chain-of-thought reasoning. During the self-learning loop, SECToR asks models to solve addition problems using chain-of-thought reasoning before training the next version of the model to solve those same problems directly without using such reasoning. This process often results in an improved model which can, when again augmented with chain-of-thought reasoning, solve even harder problems than the original model, allowing the self-learning loop to continue. Language models trained via SECToR autonomously learn to add up to the longest-length-digit numbers without access to any ground truth examples beyond an initial supervised fine-tuning phase consisting only of numbers with 6 or fewer digits. Our central hypothesis is that chain-of-thought reasoning can act as a policy improvement operator, similarly to how Monte-Carlo Tree Search is used in AlphaZero (Silver et al., 2017). We hope that this research can lead to new directions in which language models can learn to teach themselves without the need for human demonstrations.


Multi-Point Detection of the Powerful Gamma Ray Burst GRB221009A Propagation through the Heliosphere on October 9, 2022

Abstract: We present the results of processing the effects of the powerful Gamma Ray Burst GRB221009A captured by the charged particle detectors (electrostatic analyzers and solid-state detectors) onboard spacecraft at different points in the heliosphere on October 9, 2022. To follow the GRB221009A propagation through the heliosphere we used the electron and proton flux measurements from solar missions Solar Orbiter and STEREO-A; Earth magnetosphere and the solar wind missions THEMIS and Wind; meteorological satellites POES15, POES19, MetOp3; and MAVEN - a NASA mission orbiting Mars. GRB221009A had a structure of four bursts: less intense Pulse 1 - the triggering impulse - was detected by gamma-ray observatories at 131659 UT (near the Earth); the most intense Pulses 2 and 3 were detected on board all the spacecraft from the list, and Pulse 4 detected in more than 500 s after Pulse 1. Due to their different scientific objectives, the spacecraft, which data was used in this study, were separated by more than 1 AU (Solar Orbiter and MAVEN). This enabled tracking GRB221009A as it was propagating across the heliosphere. STEREO-A was the first to register Pulse 2 and 3 of the GRB, almost 100 seconds before their detection by spacecraft in the vicinity of Earth. MAVEN detected GRB221009A Pulses 2, 3, and 4 at the orbit of Mars about 237 seconds after their detection near Earth. By processing the time delays observed we show that the source location of the GRB221009A was at RA 288.5 degrees, Dec 18.5 degrees (J2000) with an error cone of 2 degrees

University of California Berkeley Berkeley

National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv

The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin


Measuring and Improving Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Vision-Language Models

Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated strong efficacy as visual assistants that can parse natural queries about the visual content and generate human-like outputs. In this work, we explore the ability of these models to demonstrate human-like reasoning based on the perceived information. To address a crucial concern regarding the extent to which their reasoning capabilities are fully consistent and grounded, we also measure the reasoning consistency of these models. We achieve this by proposing a chain-of-thought (CoT) based consistency measure. However, such an evaluation requires a benchmark that encompasses both high-level inference and detailed reasoning chains, which is costly. We tackle this challenge by proposing a LLM-Human-in-the-Loop pipeline, which notably reduces cost while simultaneously ensuring the generation of a high-quality dataset. Based on this pipeline and the existing coarse-grained annotated dataset, we build the CURE benchmark to measure both the zero-shot reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. We evaluate existing state-of-the-art VLMs, and find that even the best-performing model is unable to demonstrate strong visual reasoning capabilities and consistency, indicating that substantial efforts are required to enable VLMs to perform visual reasoning as systematically and consistently as humans. As an early step, we propose a two-stage training framework aimed at improving both the reasoning performance and consistency of VLMs. The first stage involves employing supervised fine-tuning of VLMs using step-by-step reasoning samples automatically generated by LLMs. In the second stage, we further augment the training process by incorporating feedback provided by LLMs to produce reasoning chains that are highly consistent and grounded. We empirically highlight the effectiveness of our framework in both reasoning performance and consistency.

Yangyi Chen
Karan Sikka
Michael Cogswell
Heng Ji
Ajay Divakaran


Making Large Language Models Better Reasoners with Alignment

Abstract: Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal that fine-tuning LLMs on data with the chain of thought (COT) reasoning process can significantly enhance their reasoning capabilities. However, we find that the fine-tuned LLMs suffer from an \textit{Assessment Misalignment} problem, i.e., they frequently assign higher scores to subpar COTs, leading to potential limitations in their reasoning abilities. To address this problem, we introduce an \textit{Alignment Fine-Tuning (AFT)} paradigm, which involves three steps: 1) fine-tuning LLMs with COT training data; 2) generating multiple COT responses for each question, and categorizing them into positive and negative ones based on whether they achieve the correct answer; 3) calibrating the scores of positive and negative responses given by LLMs with a novel constraint alignment loss. Specifically, the constraint alignment loss has two objectives: a) Alignment, which guarantees that positive scores surpass negative scores to encourage answers with high-quality COTs; b) Constraint, which keeps the negative scores confined to a reasonable range to prevent the model degradation. Beyond just the binary positive and negative feedback, the constraint alignment loss can be seamlessly adapted to the ranking situations when ranking feedback is accessible. Furthermore, we also delve deeply into recent ranking-based alignment methods, such as DPO, RRHF, and PRO, and discover that the constraint, which has been overlooked by these approaches, is also crucial for their performance. Extensive experiments on four reasoning benchmarks with both binary and ranking feedback demonstrate the effectiveness of AFT.

Peiyi Wang
Lei Li
Liang Chen
Feifan Song
Binghuai Lin
Yunbo Cao
Tianyu Liu
Zhifang Sui


Cumulative Reasoning with Large Language Models

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress, yet their ability to solve complex problems remains limited. In this work, we introduce Cumulative Reasoning (CR), a structured framework that enhances LLM problem-solving by emulating human-like iterative and cumulative thought processes. CR orchestrates LLMs in three distinct roles: Proposer, Verifier(s), and Reporter, to systematically decompose tasks, generate and validate intermediate reasoning steps, and compose them into a solution by building a dynamic Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of verified propositions. This approach substantially enhances problem-solving capabilities. We demonstrate CR's advantage through several complex reasoning tasks: it outperforms existing methods in logical inference tasks with up to a 9.3% improvement, achieving 98.04% accuracy on the curated FOLIO wiki dataset. In the Game of 24, it achieves 98% accuracy, marking a 24% improvement over previous methods. In solving MATH problems, CR achieves a 4.2% increase from previous methods and a 43% relative improvement in the most challenging level 5 problems. When incorporating a code environment with CR, we further harness LLMs' reasoning capabilities and outperform the Program of Thought (PoT) method by 38.8%.

Yifan Zhang
Jingqin Yang
Yang Yuan
Andrew Chi-Chih Yao


Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning (i.e., its process for answering the question). We investigate hypotheses for how CoT reasoning may be unfaithful, by examining how the model predictions change when we intervene on the CoT (e.g., by adding mistakes or paraphrasing it). Models show large variation across tasks in how strongly they condition on the CoT when predicting their answer, sometimes relying heavily on the CoT and other times primarily ignoring it. CoT's performance boost does not seem to come from CoT's added test-time compute alone or from information encoded via the particular phrasing of the CoT. As models become larger and more capable, they produce less faithful reasoning on most tasks we study. Overall, our results suggest that CoT can be faithful if the circumstances such as the model size and task are carefully chosen.

Tamera Lanham
Anna Chen
Ansh Radhakrishnan
Benoit Steiner
Carson Denison
Danny Hernandez
Dustin Li
Esin Durmus
Evan Hubinger
Jackson Kernion
Kamilė Lukošiūtė
Karina Nguyen
Newton Cheng
Nicholas Joseph
Nicholas Schiefer
Oliver Rausch
Robin Larson
Sam McCandlish
Sandipan Kundu
Saurav Kadavath
Shannon Yang
Thomas Henighan
Timothy Maxwell
Timothy Telleen-Lawton
Tristan Hume
Zac Hatfield-Dodds
Jared Kaplan
Jan Brauner
Samuel R. Bowman
Ethan Perez


Test-Time Training on Video Streams

Abstract: Prior work has established Test-Time Training (TTT) as a general framework to further improve a trained model at test time. Before making a prediction on each test instance, the model is first trained on the same instance using a self-supervised task such as reconstruction. We extend TTT to the streaming setting, where multiple test instances - video frames in our case - arrive in temporal order. Our extension is online TTT: The current model is initialized from the previous model, then trained on the current frame and a small window of frames immediately before. Online TTT significantly outperforms the fixed-model baseline for four tasks, on three real-world datasets. The improvements are more than 2.2x and 1.5x for instance and panoptic segmentation. Surprisingly, online TTT also outperforms its offline variant that accesses strictly more information, training on all frames from the entire test video regardless of temporal order. This finding challenges those in prior work using synthetic videos. We formalize a notion of locality as the advantage of online over offline TTT, and analyze its role with ablations and a theory based on bias-variance trade-off.

Renhao Wang
Yu Sun
Arnuv Tandon
Yossi Gandelsman
Xinlei Chen
Alexei A. Efros
Xiaolong Wang


Let's Do a Thought Experiment: Using Counterfactuals to Improve Moral Reasoning

Abstract: Language models still struggle on moral reasoning, despite their impressive performance in many other tasks. In particular, the Moral Scenarios task in MMLU (Multi-task Language Understanding) is among the worst performing tasks for many language models, including GPT-3. In this work, we propose a new prompting framework, Thought Experiments, to teach language models to do better moral reasoning using counterfactuals. Experiment results show that our framework elicits counterfactual questions and answers from the model, which in turn helps improve the accuracy on Moral Scenarios task by 9-16% compared to other zero-shot baselines. Interestingly, unlike math reasoning tasks, zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning doesn't work out of the box, and even reduces accuracy by around 4% compared to direct zero-shot. We further observed that with minimal human supervision in the form of 5 few-shot examples, the accuracy of the task can be improved to as much as 80%.

Xiao Ma
Swaroop Mishra
Ahmad Beirami
Alex Beutel
Jilin Chen


Deductive Verification of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate reasoning steps can inadvertently introduce hallucinations and accumulated errors, thereby limiting models' ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by how humans engage in careful and meticulous deductive logical reasoning processes to solve tasks, we seek to enable language models to perform explicit and rigorous deductive reasoning, and also ensure the trustworthiness of their reasoning process through self-verification. However, directly verifying the validity of an entire deductive reasoning process is challenging, even with advanced models like ChatGPT. In light of this, we propose to decompose a reasoning verification process into a series of step-by-step subprocesses, each only receiving their necessary context and premises. To facilitate this procedure, we propose Natural Program, a natural language-based deductive reasoning format. Our approach enables models to generate precise reasoning steps where subsequent steps are more rigorously grounded on prior steps. It also empowers language models to carry out reasoning self-verification in a step-by-step manner. By integrating this verification process into each deductive reasoning stage, we significantly enhance the rigor and trustfulness of generated reasoning steps. Along this process, we also improve the answer correctness on complex reasoning tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/lz1oceani/verify_cot.

Zhan Ling
Yunhao Fang
Xuanlin Li
Zhiao Huang
Mingu Lee
Roland Memisevic
Hao Su


Chain-of-Thought Hub: A Continuous Effort to Measure Large Language Models' Reasoning Performance

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are continuously being developed, their evaluation becomes increasingly important yet challenging. This work proposes Chain-of-Thought Hub, an open-source evaluation suite on the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models. We are interested in this setting for two reasons: (1) from the behavior of GPT and PaLM model family, we observe that complex reasoning is likely to be a key differentiator between weaker and stronger LLMs; (2) we envisage large language models to become the next-generation computational platform and foster an ecosystem of LLM-based new applications, this naturally requires the foundation models to perform complex tasks that often involve the composition of linguistic and logical operations. Our approach is to compile a suite of challenging reasoning benchmarks to track the progress of LLMs. Our current results show that: (1) model scale clearly correlates with reasoning capabilities; (2) As of May 2023, Claude-v1.3 and PaLM-2 are the only two models that are comparable with GPT-4, while open-sourced models still lag behind; (3) LLaMA-65B performs closely to code-davinci-002, indicating that with successful further development such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), it has great potential to be close to GPT-3.5-Turbo. Our results also suggest that for the open-source efforts to catch up, the community may focus more on building better base models and exploring RLHF.

Yao Fu
Litu Ou
Mingyu Chen
Yuhao Wan
Hao Peng
Tushar Khot


Beyond Chain-of-Thought, Effective Graph-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models

Abstract: With the widespread use of language models (LMs) in NLP tasks, researchers have discovered the potential of Chain-of-thought (CoT) to assist LMs in accomplishing complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate steps. However, human thought processes are often non-linear, rather than simply sequential chains of thoughts. Therefore, we propose Graph-of-Thought (GoT) reasoning, which models human thought processes not only as a chain but also as a graph. By representing thought units as nodes and connections between them as edges, our approach captures the non-sequential nature of human thinking and allows for a more realistic modeling of thought processes. GoT adopts a two-stage framework with an additional GoT encoder for thought graph representation and fuses the graph representation with the original input representation through a gated fusion mechanism. We evaluate GoT's performance on a text-only reasoning task (AQUA-RAT) and a multimodal reasoning task (ScienceQA). Our model achieves significant improvement over the strong CoT baseline on the AQUA-RAT test set and boosts accuracy from 85.19% to 87.59% using the T5-base model over the state-of-the-art Multimodal-CoT on the ScienceQA test set.


GRACE: Discriminator-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Abstract: In the context of multi-step reasoning, e.g., with chain-of-thought, language models (LMs) can easily assign a high likelihood to incorrect steps. As a result, decoding strategies that optimize for solution likelihood often yield incorrect solutions. To address this issue, we propose Guiding chain-of-thought ReAsoning with a CorrectnEss Discriminator (GRACE), a stepwise decoding approach that steers the decoding process towards producing correct reasoning steps. GRACE employs a step-level verifier or discriminator trained with a contrastive loss over correct and incorrect steps, which is used during decoding to score next-step candidates based on their correctness. Importantly, GRACE only requires sampling from the LM, without the need for LM training or fine-tuning. Using models from FLAN-T5 and LLaMA families, we evaluate GRACE over four math and two symbolic reasoning tasks, where it exhibits substantial performance gains compared to greedy decoding, verifiers, and self-consistency in most settings. When further combined with self-consistency, GRACE outperforms all the baselines by sizeable margins. Human and LLM evaluations over GSM8K show that GRACE not only improves the final answer accuracy but also the correctness of the intermediate reasoning. Our implementation can be accessed at https://github.com/mukhal/grace.

Muhammad Khalifa
Lajanugen Logeswaran
Moontae Lee
Honglak Lee
Lu Wang


ChatCoT: Tool-Augmented Chain-of-Thought Reasoning on Chat-based Large Language Models

Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performance in a variety of evaluation benchmarks, they still struggle in complex reasoning tasks which require specific knowledge and multi-hop reasoning. To improve the reasoning abilities, we propose ChatCoT, a tool-augmented chain-of-thought reasoning framework for chat-based LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT). In ChatCoT, we model the chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning as multi-turn conversations, to utilize tools in a more natural way through chatting. At each turn, LLMs can either interact with tools or perform the reasoning. Our approach can effectively leverage the multi-turn conversation ability of chat-based LLMs, and integrate the thought chain following and tools manipulation in a unified way. Specially, we initialize the early turns of the conversation by the knowledge about tools, tasks, and reasoning format, and propose an iterative tool-augmented reasoning step to perform step-by-step tool-augmented reasoning. The experiment results on two complex reasoning datasets (MATH and HotpotQA) have shown the effectiveness of ChatCoT on complex reasoning tasks, achieving a 7.9% relative improvement over the state-of-the-art baseline. Our code and data are available at: \url{https://github.com/RUCAIBOX/ChatCoT}.

Zhipeng Chen
Kun Zhou
Beichen Zhang
Zheng Gong
Wayne Xin Zhao
Ji-Rong Wen


"Is the Pope Catholic?" Applying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Understanding Conversational Implicatures

Abstract: Conversational implicatures are pragmatic inferences that require listeners to deduce the intended meaning conveyed by a speaker from their explicit utterances. Although such inferential reasoning is fundamental to human communication, recent research indicates that large language models struggle to comprehend these implicatures as effectively as the average human. This paper demonstrates that by incorporating Grice's Four Maxims into the model through chain-of-thought prompting, we can significantly enhance its performance, surpassing even the average human performance on this task.

Zae Myung Kim
David E. Taylor
Dongyeop Kang


Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Abstract: While sentiment analysis systems try to determine the sentiment polarities of given targets based on the key opinion expressions in input texts, in implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. Thus detecting implicit sentiment requires the common-sense and multi-hop reasoning ability to infer the latent intent of opinion. Inspired by the recent chain-of-thought (CoT) idea, in this work we introduce a Three-hop Reasoning (THOR) CoT framework to mimic the human-like reasoning process for ISA. We design a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion, and finally the sentiment polarity. Our THOR+Flan-T5 (11B) pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup. More strikingly, THOR+GPT3 (175B) boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 on zero-shot setting. Our code is open at https://github.com/scofield7419/THOR-ISA.

Hao Fei
Bobo Li
Qian Liu
Lidong Bing
Fei Li
Tat-Seng Chua


Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models

Abstract: Language models are increasingly being deployed for general problem solving across a wide range of tasks, but are still confined to token-level, left-to-right decision-making processes during inference. This means they can fall short in tasks that require exploration, strategic lookahead, or where initial decisions play a pivotal role. To surmount these challenges, we introduce a new framework for language model inference, Tree of Thoughts (ToT), which generalizes over the popular Chain of Thought approach to prompting language models, and enables exploration over coherent units of text (thoughts) that serve as intermediate steps toward problem solving. ToT allows LMs to perform deliberate decision making by considering multiple different reasoning paths and self-evaluating choices to decide the next course of action, as well as looking ahead or backtracking when necessary to make global choices. Our experiments show that ToT significantly enhances language models' problem-solving abilities on three novel tasks requiring non-trivial planning or search: Game of 24, Creative Writing, and Mini Crosswords. For instance, in Game of 24, while GPT-4 with chain-of-thought prompting only solved 4% of tasks, our method achieved a success rate of 74%. Code repo with all prompts: https://github.com/princeton-nlp/tree-of-thought-llm.

Shunyu Yao
Dian Yu
Jeffrey Zhao
Izhak Shafran
Thomas L. Griffiths
Yuan Cao
Karthik Narasimhan


Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought

Abstract: Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregating their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

Ori Yoran
Tomer Wolfson
Ben Bogin
Uri Katz
Daniel Deutch
Jonathan Berant


Chain of Thought Prompt Tuning in Vision Language Models

Abstract: Language-Image Pre-training has demonstrated promising results on zero-shot and few-shot downstream tasks by prompting visual models with natural language prompts. However, most recent studies only use a single prompt for tuning, neglecting the inherent step-to-step cognitive reasoning process that humans conduct in complex task settings, for example, when processing images from unfamiliar domains. Chain of Thought is a simple and effective approximation to human reasoning process and has been proven useful for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Based on this cognitive intuition, we believe that conducting effective reasoning is also an important problem in visual tasks, and a chain of thought could be a solution to this problem. In this work, we propose a novel chain of thought prompt tuning for vision-language modeling. Extensive experiments show that our method not only generalizes better in image classification tasks, has greater transferability beyond a single dataset, and has stronger domain generalization performance, but also performs much better in imagetext retrieval and visual question answering, which require more reasoning capabilities. We are the first to successfully adapt chain-of-thought prompting that combines visual and textual embeddings. We will release our codes

Jiaxin Ge
Hongyin Luo
Siyuan Qian
Yulu Gan
Jie Fu
Shanghang Zhang


A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts

Abstract: Machine learning methods strive to acquire a robust model during the training process that can effectively generalize to test samples, even in the presence of distribution shifts. However, these methods often suffer from performance degradation due to unknown test distributions. Test-time adaptation (TTA), an emerging paradigm, has the potential to adapt a pre-trained model to unlabeled data during testing, before making predictions. Recent progress in this paradigm has highlighted the significant benefits of using unlabeled data to train self-adapted models prior to inference. In this survey, we categorize TTA into several distinct groups based on the form of test data, namely, test-time domain adaptation, test-time batch adaptation, and online test-time adaptation. For each category, we provide a comprehensive taxonomy of advanced algorithms and discuss various learning scenarios. Furthermore, we analyze relevant applications of TTA and discuss open challenges and promising areas for future research. For a comprehensive list of TTA methods, kindly refer to \url{https://github.com/tim-learn/awesome-test-time-adaptation}.

International Journal of Computer Vision


Revisiting Realistic Test-Time Training: Sequential Inference and Adaptation by Anchored Clustering Regularized Self-Training

Abstract: Deploying models on target domain data subject to distribution shift requires adaptation. Test-time training (TTT) emerges as a solution to this adaptation under a realistic scenario where access to full source domain data is not available, and instant inference on the target domain is required. Despite many efforts into TTT, there is a confusion over the experimental settings, thus leading to unfair comparisons. In this work, we first revisit TTT assumptions and categorize TTT protocols by two key factors. Among the multiple protocols, we adopt a realistic sequential test-time training (sTTT) protocol, under which we develop a test-time anchored clustering (TTAC) approach to enable stronger test-time feature learning. TTAC discovers clusters in both source and target domains and matches the target clusters to the source ones to improve adaptation. When source domain information is strictly absent (i.e. source-free) we further develop an efficient method to infer source domain distributions for anchored clustering. Finally, self-training~(ST) has demonstrated great success in learning from unlabeled data and we empirically figure out that applying ST alone to TTT is prone to confirmation bias. Therefore, a more effective TTT approach is introduced by regularizing self-training with anchored clustering, and the improved model is referred to as TTAC++. We demonstrate that, under all TTT protocols, TTAC++ consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on five TTT datasets, including corrupted target domain, selected hard samples, synthetic-to-real adaptation and adversarially attacked target domain. We hope this work will provide a fair benchmarking of TTT methods, and future research should be compared within respective protocols.

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence