Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification

Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Fei Xia, Bin Li, Shizhu He, Shengping Liu, Bin Sun, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao


Abstract
Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning. However, LLMs with CoT require multi-step prompting and multi-token prediction, which is highly sensitive to individual mistakes and vulnerable to error accumulation. The above issues make the LLMs need the ability to verify the answers. In fact, after inferring conclusions in some thinking decision tasks, people often check them by re-verifying steps to avoid some mistakes. In this paper, we propose and prove that LLMs also have similar self-verification abilities. We take the conclusion obtained by CoT as one of the conditions for solving the original problem. By performing a backward verification of the answers that LLM deduced for itself, we can obtain interpretable answer validation scores to select the candidate answer with the highest score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the reasoning performance on various arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/WENGSYX/Self-Verification.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.167
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2550–2575
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.167
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.167
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Fei Xia, Bin Li, Shizhu He, Shengping Liu, Bin Sun, Kang Liu, and Jun Zhao. 2023. Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2550–2575, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification (Weng et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.167.pdf