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Large Language Models Can Self-Improve (arxiv.org)
3 points by telotortium on Nov 1, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A model answers unlabeled questions with step-by-step reasoning, keeps the answers it is most confident in, and trains on those self-made solutions instead of human labels. This lifted its math word-problem score from 74.4% to 82.1%.

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without external inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that an LLM is also capable of self-improving with only unlabeled datasets. We use a pre-trained LLM to generate "high-confidence" rationale-augmented answers for unlabeled questions using Chain-of-Thought prompting and self-consistency, and fine-tune the LLM using those self-generated solutions as target outputs. We show that our approach improves the general reasoning ability of a 540B-parameter LLM (74.4%->82.1% on GSM8K, 78.2%->83.0% on DROP, 90.0%->94.4% on OpenBookQA, and 63.4%->67.9% on ANLI-A3) and achieves state-of-the-art-level performance, without any ground truth label. We conduct ablation studies and show that fine-tuning on reasoning is critical for self-improvement.

Jiaxin Huang, Shixiang Shane Gu, Le Hou, Yuexin Wu, Xuezhi Wang, Hongkun Yu, Jiawei Han
arXiv:2210.11610 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 20, 2022 · updated Oct 25, 2022
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Also discussed: Feb 2023 (2 points, 0 comments) · Feb 2023 (3 points, 0 comments)