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Tree of Uncertain Thoughts Reasoning for Large Language Models (arxiv.org)
3 points by Jimmc414 on Sep 15, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: When a language model explores next steps, this method runs each step many times with random parts switched off to see how much answers disagree, then uses that uncertainty to guide the search. It solved planning puzzles more accurately than step-by-step or tree-search approaches.

Abstract

While the recently introduced Tree of Thoughts (ToT) has heralded advancements in allowing Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason through foresight and backtracking for global decision-making, it has overlooked the inherent local uncertainties in intermediate decision points or "thoughts". These local uncertainties, intrinsic to LLMs given their potential for diverse responses, remain a significant concern in the reasoning process. Addressing this pivotal gap, we introduce the Tree of Uncertain Thoughts (TouT) - a reasoning framework tailored for LLMs. Our TouT effectively leverages Monte Carlo Dropout to quantify uncertainty scores associated with LLMs' diverse local responses at these intermediate steps. By marrying this local uncertainty quantification with global search algorithms, TouT enhances the model's precision in response generation. We substantiate our approach with rigorous experiments on two demanding planning tasks: Game of 24 and Mini Crosswords. The empirical evidence underscores TouT's superiority over both ToT and chain-of-thought prompting methods.

Shentong Mo, Miao Xin
arXiv:2309.07694 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Sep 14, 2023
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