Lang Cao

Lang Cao

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive reasoning capabilities, particularly when guided by specifically designed prompts in complex reasoning tasks such as math word problems. These models typically solve tasks using a chain-of-thought approach, which not only bolsters their reasoning abilities but also provides valuable insights into their problem-solving process. However, there is still significant room for enhancing the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Some studies suggest that the integration of an LLM output verifier can boost reasoning accuracy without necessitating additional model training. In this paper, we follow these studies and introduce a novel graph-based method to further augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We posit that multiple solutions to a reasoning task, generated by an LLM, can be represented as a reasoning graph due to the logical connections between intermediate steps from different reasoning paths. Therefore, we propose the Reasoning Graph Verifier (GraphReason) to analyze and verify the solutions generated by LLMs. By evaluating these graphs, models can yield more accurate and reliable results.Our experimental results show that our graph-based verification method not only significantly enhances the reasoning abilities of LLMs but also outperforms existing verifier methods in terms of improving these models' reasoning performance.

Lang Cao, Yingtian Zou, Chao Peng et al.

Mathematical reasoning has been challenging for large language models (LLMs), and the introduction of step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) inference has significantly advanced the mathematical capabilities of LLMs. However, current approaches either necessitate extensive inference datasets for training or depend on few-shot methods that frequently compromise computational accuracy. To address these fundamental limitations, we propose Step Guided Reasoning, a novel training-free adaptation framework that efficiently equips general-purpose pre-trained language models with enhanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. In this approach, LLMs reflect on small reasoning steps, similar to how humans deliberate and focus attention on what to do next. By incorporating this reflective process into the inference stage, LLMs can effectively guide their reasoning from one step to the next. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the significant effect of Step Guided Reasoning in enhancing mathematical performance in state-of-the-art language models -- Qwen2-72B-Instruct outperforms its math-specific counterpart, Qwen2.5-72B-Math-Instruct, on MMLU-STEM with a score of 90.9%, compared to 87.3%. The average scores of Qwen2-7B-Instruct and Qwen2-72B-Instruct increase from 27.1% to 36. 3% and from 36. 5% to 47.4% in the math domain, respectively.