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Large Language Model Programs (arxiv.org)
1 point by tim_sw on May 11, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of just prompting a language model with examples, this approach wraps it inside a program that controls the steps of a task, like gathering evidence before answering a question. On evidence-backed question answering, it beat the usual chain-of-thought prompting by 6.4% without any retraining.

Abstract

In recent years, large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to follow instructions and perform novel tasks from a few examples. The possibility to parameterise an LLM through such in-context examples widens their capability at a much lower cost than finetuning. We extend this line of reasoning and present a method which further expands the capabilities of an LLM by embedding it within an algorithm or program. To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, we present an illustrative example of evidence-supported question-answering. We obtain a 6.4\% improvement over the chain of thought baseline through a more algorithmic approach without any finetuning. Furthermore, we highlight recent work from this perspective and discuss the advantages and disadvantages in comparison to the standard approaches.

Imanol Schlag, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Asli Celikyilmaz, Wen-tau Yih, Jason Weston, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Xian Li
arXiv:2305.05364 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted May 9, 2023
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