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arXiv:2203.14465cs.LG

STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With Reasoning

Eric Zelikman, Yuhuai Wu, Jesse Mu, Noah D. Goodman

Abstract

Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales improves language model performance on complex reasoning tasks like mathematics or commonsense question-answering. However, inducing language model rationale generation currently requires either constructing massive rationale datasets or sacrificing accuracy by using only few-shot inference. We propose a technique to iteratively leverage a small number of rationale examples and a large dataset without rationales, to bootstrap the ability to perform successively more complex reasoning. This technique, the "Self-Taught Reasoner" (STaR), relies on a simple loop: generate rationales to answer many questions, prompted with a few rationale examples; if the generated answers are wrong, try again to generate a rationale given the correct answer; fine-tune on all the rationales that ultimately yielded correct answers; repeat. We show that STaR significantly improves performance on multiple datasets compared to a model fine-tuned to directly predict final answers, and performs comparably to fine-tuning a 30$\times$ larger state-of-the-art language model on CommensenseQA. Thus, STaR lets a model improve itself by learning from its own generated reasoning.

arXiv comments
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning cs.AIArtificial Intelligence cs.CLComputation and Language

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Linked by 6 identifiable commenters in 8 comments across 7 threads, from Mar 2022 to Dec 2024.

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Discussed in comments7 threads

  1. GPT-5 is behind schedule 1 comment
    • This is a good read for some examples https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.14465 > This technique, the "Self-Taught Reasoner" (STaR), relies on a simple loop: generate rationales to answer many questions, prompted with a few rationale examples; if the generated answers are wrong, try…

      viraptorView on HNParent context

  2. The Threat to OpenAI 2 comments
    • According to that recent The Information report, Orion is supposed to be just a regular LLM except trained with synthetic data generated via Strawberry. Anthropic et al. have also been working on ways to generate synthetic data (as seen in the success of Sonnet 3.5) so I don't…

      krackersView on HNParent context

    • It is in reference to this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.14465 https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.09629

      imtringuedView on HNParent context

  3. Grok-2 Beta Release 1 comment
    • My understanding is this used to be the case[1] but isn't really true any longer due to things like the "star" method for model training[2]. Empirically it absolutely (circa GPT3) used to be the case that if you prompted with "Explain all your reasoning step by step and then…

      seanhunterView on HNParent context

    • - Throwing out the bad parts, or updating the good parts with better responses. (There's a few training programming data sets which are not great) - Self improvement without new data, like STaR https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.14465 - architecture changes to support better…

      viraptorView on HNParent context

  4. What Is Q*? [video] 1 comment
    • Specific points of time in video: "What is Q<star>?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6E41eXStsU&t=329s "LLM's [AI's] today still don't reason very well": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6E41eXStsU&t=405s Peter Liu, GSM8K/STaR tweet…

      peter_d_shermanView on HNParent context

  5. GPT-3 can run code 1 comment
    • Yeah, but I didn't bring it up because I wasn't sure how much is really the model choosing and how much is the human workflow: they emphasize the interactive part heavily. Anyway, today another great paper dropped on self-distillation: "STaR: Bootstrapping Reasoning With…

      gwernView on HNParent context

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