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.
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Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners
Canonical reference. 88% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
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abstract
Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are widely used in many sub-fields of natural language processing (NLP) and generally known as excellent few-shot learners with task-specific exemplars. Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a recent technique for eliciting complex multi-step reasoning through step-by-step answer examples, achieved the state-of-the-art performances in arithmetics and symbolic reasoning, difficult system-2 tasks that do not follow the standard scaling laws for LLMs. While these successes are often attributed to LLMs' ability for few-shot learning, we show that LLMs are decent zero-shot reasoners by simply adding "Let's think step by step" before each answer. Experimental results demonstrate that our Zero-shot-CoT, using the same single prompt template, significantly outperforms zero-shot LLM performances on diverse benchmark reasoning tasks including arithmetics (MultiArith, GSM8K, AQUA-RAT, SVAMP), symbolic reasoning (Last Letter, Coin Flip), and other logical reasoning tasks (Date Understanding, Tracking Shuffled Objects), without any hand-crafted few-shot examples, e.g. increasing the accuracy on MultiArith from 17.7% to 78.7% and GSM8K from 10.4% to 40.7% with large InstructGPT model (text-davinci-002), as well as similar magnitudes of improvements with another off-the-shelf large model, 540B parameter PaLM. The versatility of this single prompt across very diverse reasoning tasks hints at untapped and understudied fundamental zero-shot capabilities of LLMs, suggesting high-level, multi-task broad cognitive capabilities may be extracted by simple prompting. We hope our work not only serves as the minimal strongest zero-shot baseline for the challenging reasoning benchmarks, but also highlights the importance of carefully exploring and analyzing the enormous zero-shot knowledge hidden inside LLMs before crafting finetuning datasets or few-shot exemplars.
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representative citing papers
Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
Language models generate robot policy code from natural language commands via few-shot prompting, enabling spatial-geometric reasoning, generalization, and precise control on real robots.
AuDisAgent reformulates multimodal controversy detection as a dynamic audience dissemination process using screening, panel discussion, and arbitration agents, plus comment bootstrapping, and reports outperforming prior static methods on a public dataset.
LLMs match or exceed state-of-the-art traditional methods for stabilizing numerical expressions in scientific software, succeeding on 97.9% of expressions where baselines fail to improve accuracy, but struggle with control flow and high-precision literals.
Banning filler words like 'very' and 'just' improved LLM reasoning by 6.7 percentage points while E-Prime improved it by only 3.7, with gains ranking in exact inverse order of theoretical depth across models and tasks.
Reasoning LLMs with minimal tools for tree construction and analysis induce decision trees that outperform CART, compete with ensembles on low-resource tabular data, and provide human-readable reasoning traces.
LLMs display high variance and major accuracy drops on GSM-Symbolic variants of grade-school math problems, indicating they replicate training patterns rather than execute logical reasoning.
Large language models can optimize by being prompted with histories of past solutions and scores to propose better ones, producing prompts that raise accuracy up to 8% on GSM8K and 50% on Big-Bench Hard over human-designed baselines.
VoxPoser uses LLMs to compose 3D value maps via VLM interaction for model-based synthesis of robust robot trajectories on open-set language-specified manipulation tasks.
Process supervision significantly outperforms outcome supervision for training models on the MATH dataset, achieving 78% accuracy on a representative test subset with active learning and a released 800k step-label dataset.
GPT-4 exceeds the USMLE passing score by more than 20 points and outperforms both GPT-3.5 and the medically fine-tuned Med-PaLM on the MultiMedQA benchmarks.
PoT prompting improves numerical reasoning by having language models write programs executed by a computer instead of performing calculations in natural language chains of thought, with an average 12% gain over CoT.
Relabeling an identical erroneous claim from the model's own thought role to an external chat role increases explicit correction rates by 23-93 percentage points across 13 model-domain cells, indicating a chat-template artifact rather than a cognitive deficit.
TravelEval is a new benchmark with a six-dimensional evaluation framework, realistic data sandbox, and simulation-based global assessment for LLM-powered travel planning agents.
LRS trains a latent reward model on final-answer correctness to steer SAE states during inference, improving reasoning performance and implicitly encouraging better cognitive behaviors.
DistractionIF benchmark reveals inverse scaling in LLM robustness to distractors in reference text, with GRPO RL as a mitigation.
Strategy-Induct induces task-level instructions from question-only examples by generating reasoning strategies first, then using those pairs to create a guiding instruction.
RL training compute for logical reasoning follows a power law with horizon depth whose exponent rises with logical expressiveness, yielding better downstream transfer when models train on richer logics.
Memory Inception is a training-free method that injects latent KV banks at chosen layers to steer LLMs, achieving superior control-drift balance and up to 118x storage reduction on personality and structured-reasoning tasks.
Counterfactual prompting effects on LLMs are often indistinguishable from those caused by meaning-preserving paraphrases, causing most previously reported demographic sensitivities to disappear under proper statistical comparison.
FACT-E uses controlled perturbations as an instrumental signal to measure intra-chain faithfulness in CoT reasoning and combines it with answer consistency to select trustworthy trajectories.
LLMs display accuracy gaps of up to 14 percentage points on the same geometry problems solely due to representation choice, with vector forms consistently weakest and a convert-then-solve prompt helping only high-capacity models.
SLRC quantifies genuine step necessity in LLM reasoning as a causal estimator, LC-CoSR training reduces rigidity with stability guarantees, and evaluations reveal a faithfulness-sycophancy paradox across frontier models.
citing papers explorer
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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.
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Promptbreeder: Self-Referential Self-Improvement Via Prompt Evolution
Promptbreeder evolves both task prompts and the mutation prompts that improve them using LLMs, outperforming Chain-of-Thought and Plan-and-Solve on arithmetic and commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
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Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control
Language models generate robot policy code from natural language commands via few-shot prompting, enabling spatial-geometric reasoning, generalization, and precise control on real robots.
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From Static Analysis to Audience Dissemination: A Training-Free Multimodal Controversy Detection Multi-Agent Framework
AuDisAgent reformulates multimodal controversy detection as a dynamic audience dissemination process using screening, panel discussion, and arbitration agents, plus comment bootstrapping, and reports outperforming prior static methods on a public dataset.
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Assessing Large Language Models for Stabilizing Numerical Expressions in Scientific Software
LLMs match or exceed state-of-the-art traditional methods for stabilizing numerical expressions in scientific software, succeeding on 97.9% of expressions where baselines fail to improve accuracy, but struggle with control flow and high-precision literals.
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Trivial Vocabulary Bans Improve LLM Reasoning More Than Deep Linguistic Constraints
Banning filler words like 'very' and 'just' improved LLM reasoning by 6.7 percentage points while E-Prime improved it by only 3.7, with gains ranking in exact inverse order of theoretical depth across models and tasks.
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Talking Trees: Reasoning-Assisted Induction of Decision Trees for Tabular Data
Reasoning LLMs with minimal tools for tree construction and analysis induce decision trees that outperform CART, compete with ensembles on low-resource tabular data, and provide human-readable reasoning traces.
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GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models
LLMs display high variance and major accuracy drops on GSM-Symbolic variants of grade-school math problems, indicating they replicate training patterns rather than execute logical reasoning.
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Large Language Models as Optimizers
Large language models can optimize by being prompted with histories of past solutions and scores to propose better ones, producing prompts that raise accuracy up to 8% on GSM8K and 50% on Big-Bench Hard over human-designed baselines.
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VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models
VoxPoser uses LLMs to compose 3D value maps via VLM interaction for model-based synthesis of robust robot trajectories on open-set language-specified manipulation tasks.
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Let's Verify Step by Step
Process supervision significantly outperforms outcome supervision for training models on the MATH dataset, achieving 78% accuracy on a representative test subset with active learning and a released 800k step-label dataset.
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Capabilities of GPT-4 on Medical Challenge Problems
GPT-4 exceeds the USMLE passing score by more than 20 points and outperforms both GPT-3.5 and the medically fine-tuned Med-PaLM on the MultiMedQA benchmarks.
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Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks
PoT prompting improves numerical reasoning by having language models write programs executed by a computer instead of performing calculations in natural language chains of thought, with an average 12% gain over CoT.
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The Self-Correction Illusion: LLMs Correct Others but Not Themselves
Relabeling an identical erroneous claim from the model's own thought role to an external chat role increases explicit correction rates by 23-93 percentage points across 13 model-domain cells, indicating a chat-template artifact rather than a cognitive deficit.
-
TravelEval: A Comprehensive Benchmarking Framework for Evaluating LLM-Powered Travel Planning Agents
TravelEval is a new benchmark with a six-dimensional evaluation framework, realistic data sandbox, and simulation-based global assessment for LLM-powered travel planning agents.
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Latent Reward Steering: An Adaptive Inference-Time Framework that Implicitly Promotes Cognitive Behaviors in Reasoning LLMs
LRS trains a latent reward model on final-answer correctness to steer SAE states during inference, improving reasoning performance and implicitly encouraging better cognitive behaviors.
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The Curse of Helpfulness: Inverse Scaling Law in Robustness to Distractor Instructions via DistractionIF
DistractionIF benchmark reveals inverse scaling in LLM robustness to distractors in reference text, with GRPO RL as a mitigation.
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Strategy-Induct: Task-Level Strategy Induction for Instruction Generation
Strategy-Induct induces task-level instructions from question-only examples by generating reasoning strategies first, then using those pairs to create a guiding instruction.
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Can RL Teach Long-Horizon Reasoning to LLMs? Expressiveness Is Key
RL training compute for logical reasoning follows a power law with horizon depth whose exponent rises with logical expressiveness, yielding better downstream transfer when models train on richer logics.
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Memory Inception: Latent-Space KV Cache Manipulation for Steering LLMs
Memory Inception is a training-free method that injects latent KV banks at chosen layers to steer LLMs, achieving superior control-drift balance and up to 118x storage reduction on personality and structured-reasoning tasks.
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Compared to What? Baselines and Metrics for Counterfactual Prompting
Counterfactual prompting effects on LLMs are often indistinguishable from those caused by meaning-preserving paraphrases, causing most previously reported demographic sensitivities to disappear under proper statistical comparison.
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FACT-E: Causality-Inspired Evaluation for Trustworthy Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
FACT-E uses controlled perturbations as an instrumental signal to measure intra-chain faithfulness in CoT reasoning and combines it with answer consistency to select trustworthy trajectories.
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Measuring Representation Robustness in Large Language Models for Geometry
LLMs display accuracy gaps of up to 14 percentage points on the same geometry problems solely due to representation choice, with vector forms consistently weakest and a convert-then-solve prompt helping only high-capacity models.
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Measuring and curing reasoning rigidity: from decorative chain-of-thought to genuine faithfulness
SLRC quantifies genuine step necessity in LLM reasoning as a causal estimator, LC-CoSR training reduces rigidity with stability guarantees, and evaluations reveal a faithfulness-sycophancy paradox across frontier models.
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GraphMind: Theorem Selection and Conclusion Generation Framework with Dynamic GNN for LLM Reasoning
GraphMind models multi-step reasoning as an evolving heterogeneous graph, using GNN encoding and semantic matching to select theorems and generate conclusions iteratively, reporting performance gains over baselines on QA datasets.
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ARM: Discovering Agentic Reasoning Modules for Generalizable Multi-Agent Systems
ARM evolves specialized reasoning modules from basic CoT via tree search to serve as reusable components in multi-agent systems that generalize across models and domains without per-task re-optimization.
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Towards an AI co-scientist
A multi-agent AI system generates novel biomedical hypotheses that show promising experimental validation in drug repurposing for leukemia, new targets for liver fibrosis, and a bacterial gene transfer mechanism.
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Compressed Chain of Thought: Efficient Reasoning Through Dense Representations
CCoT generates variable-length continuous contemplation tokens that compress explicit reasoning chains, enabling additional dense reasoning and accuracy gains in off-the-shelf language models while allowing adaptive control of token count.
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Inference Scaling Laws: An Empirical Analysis of Compute-Optimal Inference for Problem-Solving with Language Models
Empirical analysis shows scaling inference compute via strategies like tree search can be more efficient than scaling model parameters, with 7B models plus novel search outperforming 34B models.
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Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models
Repeating training data up to 4 epochs yields negligible loss increase versus unique data for fixed compute, and a new scaling law accounts for the decaying value of repeated tokens and excess parameters.
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Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs
Gorilla is a fine-tuned LLM that surpasses GPT-4 in accurate API call generation and uses retrieval to handle documentation updates.
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Reasoning with Language Model is Planning with World Model
RAP turns LLMs into dual world-model and planning agents via MCTS to generate better reasoning paths, outperforming CoT baselines and achieving 33% relative gains over GPT-4 CoT using LLaMA-33B on plan generation.
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Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate
Multiagent debate among LLMs improves mathematical reasoning, strategic reasoning, and factual accuracy while reducing hallucinations.
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Towards Expert-Level Medical Question Answering with Large Language Models
Med-PaLM 2 achieves 86.5% accuracy on MedQA and approaches or exceeds prior state-of-the-art on other medical QA benchmarks while receiving higher physician preference ratings than human answers on consumer questions.
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Distilling Step-by-Step! Outperforming Larger Language Models with Less Training Data and Smaller Model Sizes
Distilling step-by-step uses LLM-generated rationales as additional supervision in a multi-task framework so that 770M-parameter models outperform 540B-parameter models on NLP benchmarks with only 80% of the data.
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CAMEL: Communicative Agents for "Mind" Exploration of Large Language Model Society
CAMEL proposes a role-playing framework with inception prompting that enables autonomous multi-agent cooperation among LLMs and generates conversational data for studying their behaviors.
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MM-REACT: Prompting ChatGPT for Multimodal Reasoning and Action
MM-REACT uses textual prompts to let ChatGPT collaborate with external vision experts for zero-shot multimodal reasoning and action on advanced visual tasks.
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ART: Automatic multi-step reasoning and tool-use for large language models
ART automatically generates multi-step reasoning programs with tool integration for LLMs, yielding substantial gains over few-shot and auto-CoT prompting on BigBench and MMLU while matching hand-crafted CoT on most tasks.
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PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model
PaLM-E is a single 562B-parameter multimodal model that performs embodied reasoning tasks like robotic manipulation planning and visual question answering by interleaving vision, state, and text inputs with positive transfer from joint training on language and robotics data.
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Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Multimodal-CoT achieves state-of-the-art on ScienceQA by using a two-stage process that incorporates vision into chain-of-thought rationale generation for models under 1 billion parameters.
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Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedback
On GSM8K, outcome-based supervision achieves similar final-answer error rates to process-based with less labeling, but process-based or learned reward models are needed to reach 3.4% reasoning error among correct solutions.
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Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models
Humans chatting with an unreliable LLM assistant outperform both the model alone and unaided humans on MMLU and time-limited QuALITY tasks.
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Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers
APE generates instruction candidates via LLM and selects the best by zero-shot performance of a second LLM, matching or beating human prompts on 19 of 24 NLP tasks.
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Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them
Chain-of-thought prompting enables large language models to surpass average human performance on 17 of 23 challenging BIG-Bench tasks.
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Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models
Auto-CoT automatically builds chain-of-thought demonstrations by sampling diverse questions and letting the LLM generate reasoning chains, matching manual CoT performance on ten reasoning tasks with GPT-3.
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Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models
LLMs form an inner monologue from closed-loop language feedback to improve high-level instruction completion in simulated and real robotic rearrangement and kitchen manipulation tasks.
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Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
Emergent abilities are capabilities present in large language models but absent in smaller ones and cannot be predicted by extrapolating smaller model performance.
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PhyDrawGen: Physically Grounded Diagram Generation from Natural Language
PhyDrawGen is a neuro-symbolic pipeline that extracts typed scene graphs via LLM, converts them to physically constrained PSLGs via deterministic solver, and refines via fine-tuned Qwen-VL, claiming superior performance over GPT-5-image and Gemini models on 1,449 physics problems.
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Large Language Model-Powered Query-Driven Event Timeline Summarization in Industrial Search
QDET deploys a 7B-parameter model fine-tuned with three auxiliary tasks and RL that matches a 671B model's F1 on query-driven timeline summarization while delivering measurable gains in production search metrics.
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Eyes on VLM: Benchmarking Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction in Vision Language Models
EyeVLM benchmark finds that current VLMs underperform specialized visual models on gaze following and social gaze prediction, with fine-tuning narrowing but not closing the gap.