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Take a Step Back: Evoking Reasoning via Abstraction in Large Language Models

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arxiv 2310.06117 v2 pith:UM2YPTSV submitted 2023-10-09 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

Take a Step Back: Evoking Reasoning via Abstraction in Large Language Models

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL
keywords promptingreasoningstep-backconceptsllmsmodelspalm-2lperformance
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present Step-Back Prompting, a simple prompting technique that enables LLMs to do abstractions to derive high-level concepts and first principles from instances containing specific details. Using the concepts and principles to guide reasoning, LLMs significantly improve their abilities in following a correct reasoning path towards the solution. We conduct experiments of Step-Back Prompting with PaLM-2L, GPT-4 and Llama2-70B models, and observe substantial performance gains on various challenging reasoning-intensive tasks including STEM, Knowledge QA, and Multi-Hop Reasoning. For instance, Step-Back Prompting improves PaLM-2L performance on MMLU (Physics and Chemistry) by 7% and 11% respectively, TimeQA by 27%, and MuSiQue by 7%.

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