Table of Links

Abstract and Introduction

BIG-Bench Mistake

Benchmark results

Backtracking

Related Works

Conclusion, Limitations, and References

A. Implementational details

B. Annotation

C. Benchmark scores

6 Conclusion

In this paper, we describe and release our dataset BIG-Bench Mistake for mistake finding, and propose a backtracking method to correct logical errors in CoT style traces. We show that LLMs generally struggle with finding logical errors without external feedback, but argue that this feedback can come from a reward model instead. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of backtracking, both with gold standard labels as well as with simulated reward models at lower levels of accuracy.

Limitations

One main limitation of our dataset is that it features tasks that are artificial and unrealistic for real-world applications. We made this choice to minimise ambiguity and subjectivity during the mistake finding process, but further work needs to be done to determine the effectiveness of backtracking in a more realistic setting.

Another limitation is that our paper does not evaluate backtracking on the original datasets on BIG-Bench, only showing results on the limited set that we sampled in a skewed manner, in order to maximise the value of the human annotators’ time. We leave the full evaluation to future work.

References

Rohan Anil, Andrew M Dai, Orhan Firat, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Lepikhin, Alexandre Passos, Siamak Shakeri, Emanuel Taropa, Paige Bailey, Zhifeng Chen, et al. 2023. Palm 2 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.10403.

Pinzhen Chen, Zhicheng Guo, Barry Haddow, and Kenneth Heafield. 2023. Iterative translation refinement with large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03856.

Andrew F Hayes and Klaus Krippendorff. 2007. Answering the call for a standard reliability measure for coding data. Communication methods and measures, 1(1):77–89.

Jiaxin Huang, Shixiang Shane Gu, Le Hou, Yuexin Wu, Xuezhi Wang, Hongkun Yu, and Jiawei Han. 2022. Large language models can self-improve. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.11610.

Jie Huang, Xinyun Chen, Swaroop Mishra, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Adams Wei Yu, Xinying Song, and Denny Zhou. 2023. Large language models cannot self-correct reasoning yet. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.01798.

Geunwoo Kim, Pierre Baldi, and Stephen McAleer. 2023. Language models can solve computer tasks. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.17491.

Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, and Karl Cobbe. 2023. Let’s verify step by step. arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.20050.

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

Ning Miao, Yee Whye Teh, and Tom Rainforth. 2023. Selfcheck: Using llms to zero-shot check their own step-by-step reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.00436.

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

Liangming Pan, Michael Saxon, Wenda Xu, Deepak Nathani, Xinyi Wang, and William Yang Wang. 2023. Automatically correcting large language models: Surveying the landscape of diverse self-correction strategies. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.03188.

William Saunders, Catherine Yeh, Jeff Wu, Steven Bills, Long Ouyang, Jonathan Ward, and Jan Leike. 2022. Self-critiquing models for assisting human evaluators. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.05802.

Noah Shinn, Federico Cassano, Edward Berman, Ashwin Gopinath, Karthik Narasimhan, and Shunyu Yao. 2023. Reflexion: Language agents with verbal reinforcement learning.

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. 2022. Beyond the imitation game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2206.04615.

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. 2023. Beyond the imitation game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models. Transactions on Machine Learning Research.

Mirac Suzgun, Nathan Scales, Nathanael Schärli, Sebastian Gehrmann, Yi Tay, Hyung Won Chung, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Quoc V Le, Ed H Chi, Denny Zhou, et al. 2022. Big-bench-hard/cotprompts. https://github.com/suzgunmirac/ BIG-Bench-Hard/tree/main/cot-prompts. Accessed: 2023-10-31.

Xuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc V. Le, Ed H. Chi, Sharan Narang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, and Denny Zhou. 2023. Self-consistency improves chain of thought reasoning in language models. In ICLR 2023.

Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, brian ichter, Fei Xia, Ed Chi, Quoc V Le, and Denny Zhou. 2022. Chain-of-thought prompting elicits reasoning in large language models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 35, pages 24824–24837. Curran Associates, Inc.

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