Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
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Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models
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abstract
Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting. It first samples a diverse set of reasoning paths instead of only taking the greedy one, and then selects the most consistent answer by marginalizing out the sampled reasoning paths. Self-consistency leverages the intuition that a complex reasoning problem typically admits multiple different ways of thinking leading to its unique correct answer. Our extensive empirical evaluation shows that self-consistency boosts the performance of chain-of-thought prompting with a striking margin on a range of popular arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks, including GSM8K (+17.9%), SVAMP (+11.0%), AQuA (+12.2%), StrategyQA (+6.4%) and ARC-challenge (+3.9%).
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- abstract Chain-of-thought prompting combined with pre-trained large language models has achieved encouraging results on complex reasoning tasks. In this paper, we propose a new decoding strategy, self-consistency, to replace the naive greedy decoding used in chain-of-thought prompting. It first samples a diverse set of reasoning paths instead of only taking the greedy one, and then selects the most consistent answer by marginalizing out the sampled reasoning paths. Self-consistency leverages the intuition that a complex reasoning problem typically admits multiple different ways of thinking leading to i
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representative citing papers
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citing papers explorer
-
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Chain-of-thought prompting, by including intermediate reasoning steps in few-shot examples, elicits strong reasoning abilities in large language models on arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic tasks.
-
The Optimal Sample Complexity of Learning Autoregressive Chain-of-Thought
The sample complexity of exact-trace learning for autoregressive Chain-of-Thought is O((DSdim(H) + log(1/δ))/ε), matching the local next-token class with no dependence on rollout length.
-
LLMs Improving LLMs: Agentic Discovery for Test-Time Scaling
AutoTTS discovers width-depth test-time scaling controllers through agentic search in a pre-collected trajectory environment, yielding better accuracy-cost tradeoffs than hand-designed baselines on math reasoning tasks at low cost.
-
SARL: Label-Free Reinforcement Learning by Rewarding Reasoning Topology
SARL rewards reasoning topology to improve label-free RL, outperforming baselines with gains up to 44.7% on math and 34.6% on open-ended tasks while maintaining more stable training.
-
Evaluating Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery
The SDE benchmark shows LLMs lag on scientific discovery tasks relative to general science tests, with diminishing scaling returns and shared weaknesses across models.
-
ExCyTIn-Bench: Evaluating LLM agents on Cyber Threat Investigation
ExCyTIn-Bench is the first benchmark of 7542 questions from Microsoft Sentinel threat investigation graphs, where the best LLM agent achieves a reward of 0.606.
-
The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
The AI Scientist framework enables LLMs to independently conduct the full scientific process from idea generation to paper writing and review, demonstrated across three ML subfields with papers costing under $15 each.
-
DSPy: Compiling Declarative Language Model Calls into Self-Improving Pipelines
DSPy compiles short declarative programs into LM pipelines that self-optimize and outperform both standard few-shot prompting and expert-written chains on math, retrieval, and QA tasks.
-
Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models
Tree of Thoughts enables language models to solve complex planning tasks by generating, evaluating, and searching over coherent intermediate thoughts in a tree, raising Game of 24 success from 4% to 74% with GPT-4.
-
PAL: Program-aided Language Models
PAL improves few-shot reasoning accuracy by having LLMs generate executable programs rather than text-based chains of thought, outperforming much larger models on math and logic benchmarks.
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When Thinking Hurts: Epistemic Signals in the Reasoning Chains of Visual Language Models
Thinking-mode VLMs collapse answer-token entropy, but thinking-chain entropy and length serve as robust, zero-cost hallucination predictors.
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When Does In-Context Search Help? A Sampling-Complexity Theory of Reflection-Driven Reasoning
When reflections localize early errors, in-context search solves exp-small pass-rate problems with poly sequential attempts; otherwise it offers no asymptotic gain over parallel sampling, and the update is learnable and RLVR-optimal.
-
What Drives Interactive Improvement from Feedback?
Controlled student-teacher experiments across four benchmarks show interactive gains are driven more by the student's ability to use feedback than by teacher quality, with self-feedback adding little beyond unguided retries.
-
When Does Synthetic CT Transfer? A Label-Free Donor/Host Diagnostic for Medical Vision-Language Model Routing on Real Lung CT
Donor-driven nodule properties in synthetic CT transfer to real lung CT vision-language tasks while host-driven anatomy properties do not, enabling a label-free diagnostic for model routing.
-
C3-Bench: A Context-Aware Change Captioning Benchmark
C3-Bench supplies a multi-domain dataset and LLM-based evaluation protocol that exposes systematic failures in existing change captioning models outside their training regimes.
-
Efficient and Trainable Language Model Test-Time Scaling via Local Branch Routing
LBR performs token-level test-time scaling via local branch routing on hidden states, enabling end-to-end RL training and improving Pass@1 and Pass@32 on math benchmarks over CoT and RLVR baselines.
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SPIRAL: Learning to Search and Aggregate
SPIRAL is a reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes sequential reasoning, parallel trace generation, and aggregation in language models for improved test-time performance.
-
When Agents Commit Too Soon: Diagnosing Premature Commitment in LLM Agents
Hidden-state convergence at step 4 predicts behavioral consistency in LLM agents on QA tasks (r=-0.35 to -0.83), enabling AUROC 0.97 detection of inconsistent trajectories but not improving accuracy on harder benchmarks.
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A Verifiable Search Is Not a Learnable Chain-of-Thought
Verifiable search procedures cannot be learned as forward chain-of-thought by language models; they instead learn memorization, verification, or require precomputed catalogs.
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Agentic Time Machine as an Infrastructure for Future-Event Forecasting
Agentic Time Machine reconstructs historical web states for offline evaluation of forecasting agents, with a multi-agent framework achieving top ranks on FutureX live and past benchmarks.
-
SPOT-E: Test-Time Entropy Shaping with Visual Spotlights for Frozen VLMs
SPOT-E uses entropy shaping on answer predictions with low-entropy anchors to optimize visual spotlights at test time via GRPO for better VLM performance on evidence-intensive tasks.
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SENTINEL: Failure-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Training Tool-Using Language Model Agents
SENTINEL generates targeted tasks from model failures in a Controller-Proposer-Solver loop, raising Pass^1 from 66.4 to 74.9 on Tau2-Bench Retail and outperforming standard RL.
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SMSR: Certified Defence Against Runtime Memory Poisoning in Persistent LLM Agent Systems
SMSR is the first defense with a certified robustness bound against multi-session memory poisoning in persistent LLM agents, combining HMAC provenance signing with randomized ablation and verdict-based voting.
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Agreement in Representation Space for Open-Ended Self-Consistency
EBA clusters sampled LLM generations in representation space to estimate agreement, outperforming random selection with stable scaling and showing that central positions correlate with higher generation quality.
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RealMath-Eval: Why SOTA Judges Struggle with Real Human Reasoning
RealMath-Eval benchmark shows LLM judges have an evaluation gap, performing worse on diverse real human math reasoning than on synthetic solutions due to greater error diversity and higher surprisal.
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LATTEArena: An Evaluation Framework for LLM-powered Tabular Feature Engineering (Extended Version)
LATTEArena introduces a 6-dimensional taxonomy and modular evaluation framework for LLM-powered tabular feature engineering, benchmarking 24 configurations to produce 17 findings on cost-effectiveness trade-offs with public artifacts.
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From Correctness to Utility: Gain-Based Prefix Evaluation for LLM Reasoning
Prefix gain measured via student-model solve-rate improvement is used to train a Prefix Utility Model (PUM) that supplies stronger supervision than correctness-based process rewards for mathematical reasoning.
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Stability vs. Manipulability: Evaluating Robustness Under Post-Decision Interaction in LLM Judges
LLM judges exhibit high stability under neutral re-evaluation but substantial reversibility under targeted post-decision challenges, quantified via a new Evaluation Robustness Score (ERS).
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Failed Reasoning Traces Tell You What Is Fixable (But Not by Reading Them)
Three problem-level trajectory features derived from the distributional signature of failed LLM rollouts enable failure clustering at 84.3% accuracy and a training-free routing rule that improves rescue by 12.2% on hard cases.
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Evaluating Large Language Models in Dynamic Clinical Decision-Making with Standardized Patient Cases
MedSP1000 benchmark shows top LLMs complete at most 60.4% of expert rubric items during multi-turn standardized patient simulations.
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Testing LLM Arithmetic Reasoning Generalization with Automatic Numeric-Remapping Attacks
An automatic numeric-remapping attack generator reveals 12-26 point accuracy drops on GSM8K for three LLMs while MAWPS and MultiArith stay near 98%.
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Fixing FOLIO and MALLS: Verified Annotations and an LLM-assisted Framework to Focus Human Relabeling
Audit finds 36-39% incorrect FOL labels in FOLIO and MALLS; corrections raise LLM accuracy 9-22 points and an LLM-guided review framework achieves 90% dataset quality after checking fewer than 24% of examples.
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ATLAS: Agentic Test-time Learning-to-Allocate Scaling
ATLAS introduces an LLM-orchestrated agentic framework for dynamic test-time scaling via extensible 'explore' actions, achieving higher accuracy with fewer API calls than fixed-workflow baselines on four benchmarks.
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Before and After Temperature: A Distributional View of Creative LLM Generation
A per-token feature from temperature-induced changes in LLM token distributions predicts within-prompt creativity rank at Spearman rho 0.918 vs LLM judges and 0.870 vs humans, outperforming perplexity, entropy, top-1 margin, and compression baselines.
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Pause and Think: A Dataset and Benchmark for Video-Grounded Assistive Action Suggestion
Introduces pause-and-think-T dataset and pause-and-think-B benchmark; fine-tunes 4B VLM to 58% accuracy matching 235B model while generalizing out-of-distribution.
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From Talking Words to Sharing Thoughts: Scalable Multi-LLM Aggregation via Structured Message Passing
A bipartite factor graph with message-passing protocol and asymmetric damping aggregates multi-LLM predictions, cutting token use by 97% and API calls by 6X while outperforming baselines on MMLU, MMLU-Pro, GPQA, and MedMCQA.
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Thinking as Compression: Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Context Compressor
Reasoning models naturally compress context via thinking traces, with reward-constrained optimization yielding 17-23% gains over baselines on long-context QA at high compression ratios.
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LaneRoPE: Positional Encoding for Collaborative Parallel Reasoning and Generation
LaneRoPE adds an inter-sequence attention mask and extended RoPE to enable collaborative parallel sequence generation in LLMs, yielding accuracy gains on math reasoning under length limits.
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ARBITER: Reasoning Trajectory Basins and Majority Vote Failures in Test-Time Sampling
ARBITER models reasoning trajectory basins in test-time sampling and uses model-internal signals to correct majority-vote failures, recovering part of the oracle gap on math benchmarks.
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IdioLink: Retrieving Meaning Beyond Words Across Idiomatic and Literal Expressions
IdioLink introduces a benchmark dataset and evaluation showing that strong embedding models struggle to retrieve equivalent meanings across idiomatic and literal forms, relying on shallow cues instead.
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TextReg: Mitigating Prompt Distributional Overfitting via Regularized Text-Space Optimization
TextReg mitigates prompt distributional overfitting via regularized text-space optimization, reporting up to +16.5% OOD accuracy gains over prior methods on reasoning benchmarks.
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CopT: Contrastive On-Policy Thinking with Continuous Spaces for General and Agentic Reasoning
CopT reverses CoT by eliciting a draft answer first then using continuous-embedding contrastive verification and on-policy thinking to reflect and correct, yielding up to 23% higher accuracy and 57% fewer tokens without training.
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Counterfactual Likelihood Tests for Indirect Influence in Private Reasoning Channels
Counterfactual likelihood tests detect indirect influence through public channels in private reasoning models, validated on a 7B role-channel model showing asymmetric A-to-B influence and complete pathway identification via graph-separation controls.
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EXG: Self-Evolving Agents with Experience Graphs
EXG is an experience graph framework for self-evolving LLM agents that supports online real-time growth and offline reuse to enhance solution quality and efficiency on code generation and reasoning benchmarks.
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Scale-Dependent Collective Adaptation in Self-Amending LLM Societies: A Cross-Family Study of Emergent Governance
LLM societies in Nomic show non-monotonic collective adaptation peaking at mid-scales, with smaller models rule-inert and larger ones restrictive.
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Reasoning Portability: Guiding Continual Learning for MLLMs in the RLVR Era
Formalizes Reasoning Portability (RP) and proposes RDB-CL to modulate per-sample KL regularization in RLVR for MLLM continual learning, achieving +12.0% Last accuracy over vanilla RLVR baseline by preserving reusable reasoning on high-RP samples.
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MasFACT: Continual Multi-Agent Topology Learning via Geometry-Aware Posterior Transfer
Geometry-aware FGW prior transfer plus PAC-Bayes residual adaptation reduces topology forgetting and raises average accuracy across continual multi-agent topology learning streams.
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DISA: Offline Importance Sampling for Distribution-Matching LLM-RL
DISA decouples partition function estimation using offline importance sampling for distribution-matching LLM-RL, matching or exceeding online baselines like FlowRL on math and code benchmarks while retaining more strategy diversity.
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CAPS: Cascaded Adaptive Pairwise Selection for Efficient Parallel Reasoning
CAPS is a four-stage inference-only cascade that adapts how much of each solution the verifier sees and how comparisons are distributed, halving per-candidate verifier tokens while outperforming uniform pairwise verification on most benchmarks.
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BOOKMARKS: Efficient Active Storyline Memory for Role-playing
BOOKMARKS introduces searchable bookmarks as reusable answers to storyline questions, enabling active initialization and passive synchronization for more consistent role-playing agent memory than recurrent summarization.