Multidimensional Consistency Improves Reasoning in Language Models
This addresses the problem of unreliable reasoning in language models for users needing consistent answers, though it's an incremental improvement on existing consistency techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of inconsistent reasoning in language models by introducing a Multidimensional Reasoning Consistency framework that tests answer consistency across variations in prompt order, phrasing, and language. Their method improved mathematical reasoning performance on GSM8K and MGSM datasets, particularly for smaller models.
While Large language models (LLMs) have proved able to address some complex reasoning tasks, we also know that they are highly sensitive to input variation, which can lead to different solution paths and final answers. Answer consistency across input variations can thus be taken as a sign of stronger confidence. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a framework, {\em Multidimensional Reasoning Consistency} where, focusing on math problems, models are systematically pushed to diversify solution paths towards a final answer, thereby testing them for answer consistency across multiple input variations. We induce variations in (i) order of shots in prompt, (ii) problem phrasing, and (iii) languages used. Extensive experiments on a large range of open-source state-of-the-art LLMs of various sizes show that reasoning consistency differs by variation dimension, and that by aggregating consistency across dimensions, our framework consistently enhances mathematical reasoning performance on both monolingual dataset GSM8K and multilingual dataset MGSM, especially for smaller models.