NLP

PATHFINDER: Guided Search over Multi-Step Reasoning Paths

December 04, 2023

Abstract

With recent advancements in large language models, methods like chain-of-thought prompting to elicit reasoning chains have been shown to improve results on reasoning tasks. However, tasks that require multiple steps of reasoning still pose significant challenges to state-of-the-art models. Drawing inspiration from the beam search algorithm, we propose PathFinder, a tree-search-based reasoning path generation approach. It enhances diverse branching and multi-hop reasoning through the integration of dynamic decoding, enabled by varying sampling methods and parameters. Using constrained reasoning, PathFinder integrates novel quality constraints, pruning, and exploration methods to enhance the efficiency and the quality of generation. Moreover, it includes scoring and ranking features to improve candidate selection. Our approach outperforms competitive baselines on three complex arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks by 6% on average. Our model generalizes well to longer, unseen reasoning chains, reflecting similar complexities to beam search with large branching factors.

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AUTHORS

Written by

Olga Golovneva

Asli Celikyilmaz

Luke Zettlemoyer

Maryam Fazel-Zarandi

Ram Pasunuru

Sean O'Brien

Tianlu Wang

Publisher

NeurIPS 2023 R0-FoMo Workshop

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