Learning to Check: Unleashing Potentials for Self-Correction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in reasoning capabilities, with ongoing efforts to refine their reasoning through self-correction. However, recent studies suggest that self-correction can be limited or even counterproductive without external accurate knowledge, raising questions about the limits and effectiveness of self-correction. In this paper, we aim to enhance LLM's self-checking capabilities by meticulously designing training data, thereby improving the accuracy of self-correction. We conduct a detailed analysis of error types in mathematical reasoning and develop a tailored prompt, termed "Step CoT Check". Then we construct a checking-correction dataset for training models. After integrating the original CoT data and checking-correction data for training, we observe that models could improve their self-checking capabilities, thereby enhancing their self-correction capacity and eliminating the need for external feedback or ground truth labels to ascertain the endpoint of correction. We compare the performance of models fine-tuned with the "Step CoT Check" prompt against those refined using other promps within the context of checking-correction data. The "Step CoT Check" outperforms the other two check formats in model with lager parameters, providing more precise feedback thus achieving a higher rate of correctness. For reproducibility, all the datasets and codes are provided in https://github.com/bammt/Learn-to-check.

DialCoT Meets PPO: Decomposing and Exploring Reasoning Paths in Smaller Language Models

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has proven to be effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with at least 100 billion parameters. However, it is ineffective or even detrimental when applied to reasoning tasks in Smaller Language Models (SLMs) with less than 10 billion parameters. To address this limitation, we introduce Dialogue-guided Chain-of-Thought (DialCoT) which employs a dialogue format to generate intermediate reasoning steps, guiding the model toward the final answer. Additionally, we optimize the model's reasoning path selection using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, further enhancing its reasoning capabilities. Our method offers several advantages compared to previous approaches. Firstly, we transform the process of solving complex reasoning questions by breaking them down into a series of simpler sub-questions, significantly reducing the task difficulty and making it more suitable for SLMs. Secondly, we optimize the model's reasoning path selection through the PPO algorithm. We conduct comprehensive experiments on four arithmetic reasoning datasets, demonstrating that our method achieves significant performance improvements compared to state-of-the-art competitors.

Mao-Zedong At SemEval-2023 Task 4: Label Represention Multi-Head Attention Model With Contrastive Learning-Enhanced Nearest Neighbor Mechanism For Multi-Label Text Classification

The study of human values is essential in both practical and theoretical domains. With the development of computational linguistics, the creation of large-scale datasets has made it possible to automatically recognize human values accurately. SemEval 2023 Task 4\cite{kiesel:2023} provides a set of arguments and 20 types of human values that are implicitly expressed in each argument. In this paper, we present our team's solution. We use the Roberta\cite{liu_roberta_2019} model to obtain the word vector encoding of the document and propose a multi-head attention mechanism to establish connections between specific labels and semantic components. Furthermore, we use a contrastive learning-enhanced K-nearest neighbor mechanism\cite{su_contrastive_2022} to leverage existing instance information for prediction. Our approach achieved an F1 score of 0.533 on the test set and ranked fourth on the leaderboard.