Large Language Models Can Self-improveDownload PDF

Published: 01 Feb 2023, Last Modified: 13 Feb 2023Submitted to ICLR 2023Readers: Everyone
Keywords: natural language processing, unsupervised learning, chain of thought
TL;DR: Improving Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models in An Unsupervised Fashion
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without external inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that an LLM is also capable of self-improving with only unlabeled datasets. We use a pre-trained LLM to generate “high-confidence” rationale-augmented answers for unlabeled questions using Chain-of-Thought prompting and self-consistency, and fine-tune the LLM using those self-generated solutions as target outputs. We show that our approach improves the general reasoning ability of a 540B-parameter LLM (74.4%→82.1% on GSM8K, 78.2%→83.0% on DROP, 90.0%→94.4% on OpenBookQA, and 63.4%→67.9% on ANLI-A3) and achieves state-of-the-art-level performance, without any ground truth label. We conduct ablation studies and show that finetuning on reasoning is critical for self-improvement.
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