HackerPapers

arXiv:2305.20050cs.LG

Let's Verify Step by Step

Hunter Lightman, Vineet Kosaraju, Yura Burda, Harri Edwards, Bowen Baker, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever, Karl Cobbe

Abstract

In recent years, large language models have greatly improved in their ability to perform complex multi-step reasoning. However, even state-of-the-art models still regularly produce logical mistakes. To train more reliable models, we can turn either to outcome supervision, which provides feedback for a final result, or process supervision, which provides feedback for each intermediate reasoning step. Given the importance of training reliable models, and given the high cost of human feedback, it is important to carefully compare the both methods. Recent work has already begun this comparison, but many questions still remain. We conduct our own investigation, finding that process supervision significantly outperforms outcome supervision for training models to solve problems from the challenging MATH dataset. Our process-supervised model solves 78% of problems from a representative subset of the MATH test set. Additionally, we show that active learning significantly improves the efficacy of process supervision. To support related research, we also release PRM800K, the complete dataset of 800,000 step-level human feedback labels used to train our best reward model.

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

On Hacker News

Linked by 5 identifiable commenters in 5 comments across 5 threads, from Nov 2023 to Sep 2026. Found in 5 HN submissions from Jun 2023 to Sep 2024. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments5 threads

    • there is a number of different methods. One is a separate model/classifier trained with human annotation. Here's a paper by OAI: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.20050

      dilyevskyView on HNParent context

    • First graph tells the story - below a certain model size (500m params), reinforcement learning is close to useless. Above this (task-dependent) model size threshold, reinforcement learning basically works. I suspect this is what we saw play out with math/coding reasoning models…

      highfrequencyView on HNParent context

  1. The Threat to OpenAI 1 comment
    • "just a regular LLM except [trained on very different data]." I'm not saying there's some big moat, anyone can read https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.20050, but not all synthetic data is created equal. Strawberry I'm sure generates beautiful, valid chain-of-thought reasoning data.…

      llmfanView on HNParent context

    • Great, a worthy competition which being first and correctness completely matter and may the best AI model win. Hopefully DeepMind doesn’t enter otherwise they would smoke everyone else other than OpenAI. Speaking of which, I’ll give you a 1% chance of winning with this paper…

      rvzView on HNParent context

    • This is the one you want https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.20050.pdf It’s different from the link the other user posted. This one is specifically about the Q* process

      ratg13View on HNParent context

Submitted to Hacker News

Connected through shared HN threads, not inferred similarity or a recommendation.