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Discriminator-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (arxiv.org)
2 points by mkhalifa on Nov 2, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A trained checker scores each next step for correctness and steers the model toward good ones, no retraining needed. It beat the usual pick-the-most-likely-step approach and answer-checking methods on most math and logic tasks, and did better when combined with voting over several tries.

Abstract · GRACE: Discriminator-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

In the context of multi-step reasoning, e.g., with chain-of-thought, language models (LMs) can easily assign a high likelihood to incorrect steps. As a result, decoding strategies that optimize for solution likelihood often yield incorrect solutions. To address this issue, we propose Guiding chain-of-thought ReAsoning with a CorrectnEss Discriminator (GRACE), a stepwise decoding approach that steers the decoding process towards producing correct reasoning steps. GRACE employs a step-level verifier or discriminator trained with a contrastive loss over correct and incorrect steps, which is used during decoding to score next-step candidates based on their correctness. Importantly, GRACE only requires sampling from the LM, without the need for LM training or fine-tuning. Using models from FLAN-T5 and LLaMA families, we evaluate GRACE over four math and two symbolic reasoning tasks, where it exhibits substantial performance gains compared to greedy decoding, verifiers, and self-consistency in most settings. When further combined with self-consistency, GRACE outperforms all the baselines by sizeable margins. Human and LLM evaluations over GSM8K show that GRACE not only improves the final answer accuracy but also the correctness of the intermediate reasoning. Our implementation can be accessed at https://github.com/mukhal/grace.

Muhammad Khalifa, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Lu Wang
arXiv:2305.14934 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted May 24, 2023 · updated Jan 3, 2026
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The paper proposes a step-wise decoding approach that improves multi-step (chain-of-thought) reasoning by using a discriminator to score and guide the generation of correct reasoning steps. It outperforms other decoding methods on various tasks and enhances both final answer accuracy and intermediate reasoning correctness. Interestingly, the proposed approach does not require any sort of LM fine-tuning.