In this paper, we aim to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform explicit and rigorous deductive reasoning while ensuring the trustworthiness of their reasoning processes through self-verification. To this end, we have proposed a novel framework based on “Natural Program”, a natural language-based deductive reasoning format that facilitates reasoning verification and can be easily generated through in-context learning. Within this framework, we decompose the verification process of complex reasoning chains into step-by-step subprocesses that focus solely on necessary context and premises, allowing us to significantly enhance the accuracy of verification. Additionally, we introduce a Unanimity-Plurality Voting strategy to further improve verification accuracy. Experimentally, we demonstrate the superiority of our framework in improving the rigor, trustworthiness, and interpretability of reasoning steps and answers.

\ Broader Impact. While our deductive verification approach can mitigate hallucinations and reasoning errors of Large Language Models (LLMs), it does not completely eliminate these phenomena. LLMs can still produce harmful and biased content, make incorrect claims, and produce wrongful advice. This issue becomes particularly significant when LLMs engage in complex reasoning chains, increasing the risk of misleading users. Consequently, it is still crucial for users to exercise great caution when interacting with, deploying, or developing LLM-based applications.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Tongzhou Mu and Caiwei Xiao from UC San Diego, Kairong Luo from Tsinghua University, and Pulkit Madan, Reza Pourreza, Sunny Panchal, and Apratim Bhattacharyya from Qualcomm for their valuable discussions and feedback.

References

[1] Kushal Arora, Layla El Asri, Hareesh Bahuleyan, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung. Why exposure bias matters: An imitation learning perspective of error accumulation in language generation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.01171, 2022.

\ [2] Kaj Bostrom, Zayne Sprague, Swarat Chaudhuri, and Greg Durrett. Natural language deduction through search over statement compositions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.06028, 2022.

\ [3] Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, et al. Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in neural information processing systems, 33:1877–1901, 2020.

\ [4] Sébastien Bubeck, Varun Chandrasekaran, Ronen Eldan, Johannes Gehrke, Eric Horvitz, Ece Kamar, Peter Lee, Yin Tat Lee, Yuanzhi Li, Scott Lundberg, et al. Sparks of artificial general intelligence: Early experiments with gpt-4. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.12712, 2023.

\ [5] Wenhu Chen, Xueguang Ma, Xinyi Wang, and William W Cohen. Program of thoughts prompting: Disentangling computation from reasoning for numerical reasoning tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.12588, 2022.

\ [6] Xinyun Chen, Maxwell Lin, Nathanael Schärli, and Denny Zhou. Teaching large language models to self-debug. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.05128, 2023.

\ [7] Wei-Lin Chiang, Zhuohan Li, Zi Lin, Ying Sheng, Zhanghao Wu, Hao Zhang, Lianmin Zheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Yonghao Zhuang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, and Eric P. Xing. Vicuna: An open-source chatbot impressing gpt-4 with 90%* chatgpt quality, March 2023.

\ [8] Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Jacob Devlin, Maarten Bosma, Gaurav Mishra, Adam Roberts, Paul Barham, Hyung Won Chung, Charles Sutton, Sebastian Gehrmann, et al. Palm: Scaling language modeling with pathways. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.02311, 2022.

\ [9] Hyung Won Chung, Le Hou, Shayne Longpre, Barret Zoph, Yi Tay, William Fedus, Eric Li, Xuezhi Wang, Mostafa Dehghani, Siddhartha Brahma, et al. Scaling instruction-finetuned language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.11416, 2022.

\ [10] Karl Cobbe, Vineet Kosaraju, Mohammad Bavarian, Mark Chen, Heewoo Jun, Lukasz Kaiser, Matthias Plappert, Jerry Tworek, Jacob Hilton, Reiichiro Nakano, et al. Training verifiers to solve math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14168, 2021.

\ [11] Antonia Creswell and Murray Shanahan. Faithful reasoning using large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.14271, 2022.

\ [12] Antonia Creswell, Murray Shanahan, and Irina Higgins. Selection-inference: Exploiting large language models for interpretable logical reasoning. In The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, 2023.

\ [13] Danny Driess, Fei Xia, Mehdi SM Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Quan Vuong, Tianhe Yu, et al. Palm-e: An embodied multimodal language model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03378, 2023.

\ [14] Andrew Drozdov, Nathanael Schärli, Ekin Akyürek, Nathan Scales, Xinying Song, Xinyun Chen, Olivier Bousquet, and Denny Zhou. Compositional semantic parsing with large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.15003, 2022.

\ [15] Olga Golovneva, Moya Peng Chen, Spencer Poff, Martin Corredor, Luke Zettlemoyer, Maryam FazelZarandi, and Asli Celikyilmaz. Roscoe: A suite of metrics for scoring step-by-step reasoning. In The Eleventh International Conference on Learning Representations, 2022.

\ [16] Nuno M Guerreiro, Duarte Alves, Jonas Waldendorf, Barry Haddow, Alexandra Birch, Pierre Colombo, and André FT Martins. Hallucinations in large multilingual translation models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.16104, 2023.

\ [17] Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Saurav Kadavath, Akul Arora, Steven Basart, Eric Tang, Dawn Song, and Jacob Steinhardt. Measuring mathematical problem solving with the math dataset. arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.03874, 2021.

\ [18] Jordan Hoffmann, Sebastian Borgeaud, Arthur Mensch, Elena Buchatskaya, Trevor Cai, Eliza Rutherford, Diego de Las Casas, Lisa Anne Hendricks, Johannes Welbl, Aidan Clark, et al. Training compute-optimal large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.15556, 2022.

\ [19] Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Oren Etzioni, and Nate Kushman. Learning to solve arithmetic word problems with verb categorization. In EMNLP, pages 523–533, 2014.

\ [20] Ziwei Ji, Nayeon Lee, Rita Frieske, Tiezheng Yu, Dan Su, Yan Xu, Etsuko Ishii, Ye Jin Bang, Andrea Madotto, and Pascale Fung. Survey of hallucination in natural language generation. ACM Computing Surveys, 55(12):1–38, 2023.

\ [21] Takeshi Kojima, Shixiang Shane Gu, Machel Reid, Yutaka Matsuo, and Yusuke Iwasawa. Large language models are zero-shot reasoners. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.11916, 2022.

\ [22] Nate Kushman, Yoav Artzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, and Regina Barzilay. Learning to automatically solve algebra word problems. In Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 271–281, Baltimore, Maryland, June 2014. Association for Computational Linguistics.

\ [23] Andrew Lampinen, Ishita Dasgupta, Stephanie Chan, Kory Mathewson, Mh Tessler, Antonia Creswell, James McClelland, Jane Wang, and Felix Hill. Can language models learn from explanations in context? In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 537–563, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, December 2022. Association for Computational Linguistics.

\ [24] Wang Ling, Dani Yogatama, Chris Dyer, and Phil Blunsom. Program induction by rationale generation: Learning to solve and explain algebraic word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1705.04146, 2017.

\ [25] Pengfei Liu, Weizhe Yuan, Jinlan Fu, Zhengbao Jiang, Hiroaki Hayashi, and Graham Neubig. Pre-train, prompt, and predict: A systematic survey of prompting methods in natural language processing. ACM Computing Surveys, 55(9):1–35, 2023.

\ [26] Pan Lu, Swaroop Mishra, Tanglin Xia, Liang Qiu, Kai-Wei Chang, Song-Chun Zhu, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Clark, and Ashwin Kalyan. Learn to explain: Multimodal reasoning via thought chains for science question answering. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:2507–2521, 2022.

\ [27] Qing Lyu, Shreya Havaldar, Adam Stein, Li Zhang, Delip Rao, Eric Wong, Marianna Apidianaki, and Chris Callison-Burch. Faithful chain-of-thought reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.13379, 2023.

\ [28] Aman Madaan, Niket Tandon, Prakhar Gupta, Skyler Hallinan, Luyu Gao, Sarah Wiegreffe, Uri Alon, Nouha Dziri, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Yiming Yang, et al. Self-refine: Iterative refinement with self-feedback. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.17651, 2023.

\ [29] Ana Marasovic, Iz Beltagy, Doug Downey, and Matthew E. Peters. Few-shot self-rationalization with ´ natural language prompts, 2022. [30] Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Bernd Bohnet, and Ryan McDonald. On faithfulness and factuality in abstractive summarization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00661, 2020.

\ [31] OpenAI. Gpt-4 technical report, 2023.

\ [32] Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, et al. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:27730–27744, 2022.

\ [33] Debjit Paul, Mete Ismayilzada, Maxime Peyrard, Beatriz Borges, Antoine Bosselut, Robert West, and Boi Faltings. Refiner: Reasoning feedback on intermediate representations. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.01904, 2023.

\ [34] Archiki Prasad, Swarnadeep Saha, Xiang Zhou, and Mohit Bansal. Receval: Evaluating reasoning chains via correctness and informativeness. 2023.

\ [35] Danilo Ribeiro, Shen Wang, Xiaofei Ma, Henry Zhu, Rui Dong, Deguang Kong, Juliette Burger, Anjelica Ramos, William Wang, Zhiheng Huang, et al. Street: A multi-task structured reasoning and explanation benchmark. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.06729, 2023.

\ [36] Subhro Roy and Dan Roth. Solving general arithmetic word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.01413, 2016.

\ [37] Victor Sanh, Albert Webson, Colin Raffel, Stephen H Bach, Lintang Sutawika, Zaid Alyafeai, Antoine Chaffin, Arnaud Stiegler, Teven Le Scao, Arun Raja, et al. Multitask prompted training enables zero-shot task generalization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.08207, 2021.

\ [38] Teven Le Scao, Angela Fan, Christopher Akiki, Ellie Pavlick, Suzana Ilic, Daniel Hesslow, Roman ´ Castagné, Alexandra Sasha Luccioni, François Yvon, Matthias Gallé, et al. Bloom: A 176b-parameter open-access multilingual language model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.05100, 2022.

\ [39] Timo Schick, Jane Dwivedi-Yu, Roberto Dessì, Roberta Raileanu, Maria Lomeli, Luke Zettlemoyer, Nicola Cancedda, and Thomas Scialom. Toolformer: Language models can teach themselves to use tools. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.04761, 2023.

\ [40] Jianhao Shen, Yichun Yin, Lin Li, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Ming Zhang, and Qun Liu. Generate & rank: A multi-task framework for math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.03034, 2021.

\ [41] Freda Shi, Xinyun Chen, Kanishka Misra, Nathan Scales, David Dohan, Ed Chi, Nathanael Schärli, and Denny Zhou. Large language models can be easily distracted by irrelevant context. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.00093, 2023.

\ [42] Freda Shi, Mirac Suzgun, Markus Freitag, Xuezhi Wang, Suraj Srivats, Soroush Vosoughi, Hyung Won Chung, Yi Tay, Sebastian Ruder, Denny Zhou, et al. Language models are multilingual chain-of-thought reasoners. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03057, 2022.

\ [43] Noah Shinn, Beck Labash, and Ashwin Gopinath. Reflexion: an autonomous agent with dynamic memory and self-reflection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.11366, 2023.

\ [44] Chenglei Si, Zhe Gan, Zhengyuan Yang, Shuohang Wang, Jianfeng Wang, Jordan Boyd-Graber, and Lijuan Wang. Prompting gpt-3 to be reliable. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.09150, 2022.

\ [45] Aarohi Srivastava, Abhinav Rastogi, Abhishek Rao, Abu Awal Md Shoeb, Abubakar Abid, Adam Fisch, Adam R Brown, Adam Santoro, Aditya Gupta, Adrià Garriga-Alonso, et al. Beyond the imitation game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.04615, 2022.

\ [46] Oyvind Tafjord, Bhavana Dalvi, and Peter Clark. Proofwriter: Generating implications, proofs, and abductive statements over natural language. In Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, and Roberto Navigli, editors, Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL/IJCNLP 2021, Online Event, August 1-6, 2021, volume ACL/IJCNLP 2021 of Findings of ACL, pages 3621–3634. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2021.

\ [47] Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, Xavier Martinet, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Timothée Lacroix, Baptiste Rozière, Naman Goyal, Eric Hambro, Faisal Azhar, et al. Llama: Open and efficient foundation language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13971, 2023.

\ [48] Xuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc Le, Ed Chi, and Denny Zhou. Self-consistency improves chain of thought reasoning in language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.11171, 2022.

\ [49] Jason Wei, Yi Tay, Rishi Bommasani, Colin Raffel, Barret Zoph, Sebastian Borgeaud, Dani Yogatama, Maarten Bosma, Denny Zhou, Donald Metzler, et al. Emergent abilities of large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.07682, 2022.

\ [50] Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Ed Chi, Quoc Le, and Denny Zhou. Chain of thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.11903, 2022.

\ [51] Sean Welleck, Ilia Kulikov, Stephen Roller, Emily Dinan, Kyunghyun Cho, and Jason Weston. Neural text generation with unlikelihood training. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04319, 2019.

\ [52] Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Shizhu He, Kang Liu, and Jun Zhao. Large language models are reasoners with self-verification. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.09561, 2022.

\ [53] Kaiyu Yang, Jia Deng, and Danqi Chen. Generating natural language proofs with verifier-guided search. In Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2022.

\ [54] Shunyu Yao, Jeffrey Zhao, Dian Yu, Nan Du, Izhak Shafran, Karthik Narasimhan, and Yuan Cao. React: Synergizing reasoning and acting in language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03629, 2022.

\ [55] Eric Zelikman, Jesse Mu, Noah D Goodman, and Yuhuai Tony Wu. Star: Self-taught reasoner bootstrapping reasoning with reasoning. 2022.

\ [56] Andy Zeng, Adrian Wong, Stefan Welker, Krzysztof Choromanski, Federico Tombari, Aveek Purohit, Michael Ryoo, Vikas Sindhwani, Johnny Lee, Vincent Vanhoucke, et al. Socratic models: Composing zero-shot multimodal reasoning with language. arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.00598, 2022.

\ [57] Susan Zhang, Stephen Roller, Naman Goyal, Mikel Artetxe, Moya Chen, Shuohui Chen, Christopher Dewan, Mona Diab, Xian Li, Xi Victoria Lin, et al. Opt: Open pre-trained transformer language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.01068, 2022.

\ [58] Zhuosheng Zhang, Aston Zhang, Mu Li, and Alex Smola. Automatic chain of thought prompting in large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.03493, 2022.

\ [59] Denny Zhou, Nathanael Schärli, Le Hou, Jason Wei, Nathan Scales, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Olivier Bousquet, Quoc Le, and Ed Chi. Least-to-most prompting enables complex reasoning in large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.10625, 2022.

\ [60] Hattie Zhou, Azade Nova, Hugo Larochelle, Aaron Courville, Behnam Neyshabur, and Hanie Sedghi. Teaching algorithmic reasoning via in-context learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2211.09066, 2022.

:::info This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY 4.0 DEED license.

:::

Feed: Hacker Noon - Medium

View: Original article

Tags: applications content framework