Path-Consistency with Prefix Enhencement for Efficient Inference in LLM

ACL ARR 2025 May Submission5750 Authors

Abstract: To enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), self-consistency has become a popular approach, combining multiple samplings with majority voting. However, current methods are computationally expensive and time-consuming due to the need for numerous samplings. To address this, this paper introduces path-consistency, which leverages the confidence of earlier-generated answers to identify the most promising prefix and guide the generation of subsequent branches. By dynamically guiding the generation of subsequent branches based on this prefix, path-consistency mitigates both the errors and redundancies from random or less useful sampling in self-consistency. This approach reduces errors and redundancies from random sampling, significantly accelerating inference by minimizing token consumption. Our extensive empirical results demonstrate that path-consistency improves inference latency by up to 40.5\%, while maintaining task accuracy across various tasks, including mathematical reasoning, commonsense reasoning, and symbolic reasoning.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Efficient/Low-Resource Methods for NLP

Research Area Keywords: Large Language Model, Efficient Inference, Reasoning, Chain-of-Thought Prompting, Self-Consistency

Contribution Types: Approaches to low-resource settings, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 5750