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SelfCheck: Using LLMs to Zero-Shot Check Their Own Step-by-Step Reasoning

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arxiv 2308.00436 v3 pith:MDFLHIBE submitted 2023-08-01 cs.AI cs.CLcs.LG

SelfCheck: Using LLMs to Zero-Shot Check Their Own Step-by-Step Reasoning

classification cs.AI cs.CLcs.LG
keywords llmserrorsreasoningselfcheckanswerstep-by-stepzero-shotable
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The recent progress in large language models (LLMs), especially the invention of chain-of-thought prompting, has made it possible to automatically answer questions by stepwise reasoning. However, when faced with more complicated problems that require non-linear thinking, even the strongest LLMs make mistakes. To address this, we explore whether LLMs are able to recognize errors in their own step-by-step reasoning, without resorting to external resources. To this end, we propose SelfCheck, a general-purpose zero-shot verification schema for recognizing such errors. We then use the results of these checks to improve question-answering performance by conducting weighted voting on multiple solutions to the question. We test SelfCheck on three datasets (GSM8K, MathQA, and MATH) and find that it successfully recognizes errors and, in turn, increases final answer accuracies.

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Cited by 16 Pith papers

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