Adaption-of-Thought: Learning Question Difficulty Improves Large Language Models for Reasoning

Mayi Xu, Yongqi Li, Ke Sun, Tieyun Qian

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown excellent capability for solving reasoning problems. Existing approaches do not differentiate the question difficulty when designing prompting methods for them. Clearly, a simple method cannot elicit sufficient knowledge from LLMs to answer a hard question. Meanwhile, a sophisticated one will force the LLM to generate redundant or even inaccurate intermediate steps toward a simple question. Consequently, the performance of existing methods fluctuates among various questions.In this work, we propose Adaption-of-Thought (AdoT), an adaptive method to improve LLMs for the reasoning problem, which first measures the question difficulty and then tailors demonstration set construction and difficulty-adapted retrieval strategies for the adaptive demonstration construction. Experimental results on three reasoning tasks prove the superiority of our proposed method, showing an absolute improvement of up to 5.5% on arithmetic reasoning, 7.4% on symbolic reasoning, and 2.3% on commonsense reasoning. Our codes and implementation details are available at: https://github.com/NLPGM/AdoT