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Oral Poster

Solving Intricate Problems with Human-like Decomposition and Rethinking

Shangzi Xue · Zhenya Huang · Jiayu Liu · Xin Lin · Yuting Ning · Binbin Jin · Xin Li · Qi Liu

East Exhibit Hall A-C #2803
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Thu 12 Dec 11 a.m. PST — 2 p.m. PST
 
Oral presentation: Oral Session 3B: Natural Language Processing
Thu 12 Dec 10 a.m. PST — 11 a.m. PST

Abstract:

In this paper, we introduce a novel reasoning framework DeAR (Decompose-Analyze-Rethink) for large language models (LLMs) to conduct intricate reasoning. Our key idea is inspired by human cognitive reasoning, which refines complex problem-solving by breaking it down into sub-questions within a Reasoning Tree and then updating prior answers based on the responses to these sub-questions. In our framework, we propose a Decompose-Analyze-Rethink cycle, which gradually forms a reasoning tree guiding the reasoning process. Specifically, given the problem, the Decompose stage introduces a prompt-based method to break it into simpler sub-ones at subsequent tree nodes. Then, the Analyze stage generates and self-checks the rationales at the node level. Last, the Rethink stage updates the rationales of parent nodes based on its children's feedback. Our reasoning paradigm is more flexible than state-of-the-art methods including Tree-of-Thoughts (ToT), and Graph-of-Thoughts (GoT), as each branch is autonomously generated without fixed settings, and moreover, allows for timely and globally rationale correction throughout the entire process. We conduct extensive experiments on three reasoning benchmarks including ScienceQA, StrategyQA, and GSM8K. Experimental results show that our approach can significantly reduce logical errors and enhance the performance with different LLMs. Our codes are available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Coarse-to-Fine-F216/.

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