[HN Gopher] Thought Propagation: An analogical approach to compl...
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       Thought Propagation: An analogical approach to complex reasoning
       with LLMs
        
       Author : amilios
       Score  : 36 points
       Date   : 2023-10-10 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (paperswithcode.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (paperswithcode.com)
        
       | amilios wrote:
       | Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable
       | success in reasoning tasks with the development of prompting
       | methods. However, existing prompting approaches cannot reuse
       | insights of solving similar problems and suffer from accumulated
       | errors in multi-step reasoning, since they prompt LLMs to reason
       | _from scratch_. To address these issues, we propose _Thought
       | Propagation_ (TP), which explores the analogous problems and
       | leverages their solutions to enhance the complex reasoning
       | ability of LLMs. These analogous problems are related to the
       | input one, with reusable solutions and problem-solving
       | strategies. Thus, it is promising to propagate insights of
       | solving previous analogous problems to inspire new problem-
       | solving. To achieve this, TP first prompts LLMs to propose and
       | solve a set of analogous problems that are related to the input
       | one. Then, TP reuses the results of analogous problems to
       | directly yield a new solution or derive a knowledge-intensive
       | plan for execution to amend the initial solution obtained from
       | scratch. TP is compatible with existing prompting approaches,
       | allowing plug-and-play generalization and enhancement in a wide
       | range of tasks without much labor in task-specific prompt
       | engineering. Experiments across three challenging tasks
       | demonstrate TP enjoys a substantial improvement over the
       | baselines by an average of 12% absolute increase in finding the
       | optimal solutions in Shortest-path Reasoning, 13% improvement of
       | human preference in Creative Writing, and 15% enhancement in the
       | task completion rate of LLM-Agent Planning.
        
       | mjhay wrote:
       | Solving a set of analogous problems and then refining from those
       | doesn't sound all that different from the general idea of adding
       | another layer.
        
       | bpiche wrote:
       | Seems like chain of thought.. except instead of giving the llm an
       | explicit set of instructions and having the llm step through a
       | series of problems, you give it a simple instruction and it
       | hallucinates an analogous series of steps that are statistically
       | relevant.
       | 
       | Could be interesting. Some of the best innovations in human
       | history were basically highdeas cooked up in the shower by
       | associating a hard problem with something else.
       | 
       | Are you the same user who got some flak for posting the abstract
       | of a paper without quotations recently? Keep on truckin'.
        
         | amilios wrote:
         | The abstract of a paper without quotations? No, I don't think
         | so. What do you mean exactly? Someone posted the abstract as a
         | text post directly?
        
           | bpiche wrote:
           | I was mistaken, it was not you, but it did happen recently.
           | My apologies.
           | 
           | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37816614
        
             | amilios wrote:
             | Ah I see. Yeah the criticism seems fair, gotta at least
             | prepend "Abstract:" or something haha.
        
               | swatcoder wrote:
               | Even with the prefix, it's not really HN etiquette to
               | post comments that are entirely or predominantly pasted.
               | And I'm happy about that.
               | 
               | Even here, you're "Abstract:" comment was just a wall of
               | text that would have been easier to read on the other end
               | of that URL and with little less convenience. There's
               | just no need for it to be pasted in as a comment as well,
               | unless you had something substantial to add alongside it.
        
               | Philpax wrote:
               | I wouldn't generalise your preferences to HN etiquette.
               | 
               | I personally like having some context in the comments as
               | I often check the comments before the link - that allows
               | me to see what the community thinks of the content before
               | I check it out for myself.
        
               | swatcoder wrote:
               | I'm with you in reading comments first, but I look for
               | _comments_ there, not uncommented pastes.
        
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