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arXiv · 2407.00390

Advancing Process Verification for Large Language Models via Tree-Based Preference Learning

Mingqian He·Yongliang Shen·Wenqi Zhang·Zeqi Tan·Weiming Lu
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Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in handling complex reasoning tasks by generating step-by-step rationales.Some methods have proven effective in boosting accuracy by introducing extra verifiers to assess these paths. However, existing verifiers, typically trained on binary-labeled reasoning paths, fail to fully utilize the relative merits of intermediate steps, thereby limiting the effectiveness of the feedback provided. To overcome this limitation, we propose Tree-based Preference Learning Verifier (Tree-PLV), a novel approach that constructs reasoning trees via a best-first search algorithm and collects step-level paired data for preference training. Compared to traditional binary classification, step-level preferences more finely capture the nuances between reasoning steps, allowing for a more precise evaluation of the complete reasoning path. We empirically evaluate Tree-PLV across a range of arithmetic and commonsense reasoning tasks, where it significantly outperforms existing benchmarks. For instance, Tree-PLV achieved substantial performance gains over the Mistral-7B self-consistency baseline on GSM8K (67.55% to 82.79%), MATH (17.00% to 26.80%), CSQA (68.14% to 72.97%), and StrategyQA (82.86% to 83.25%).Additionally, our study explores the appropriate granularity for applying preference learning, revealing that step-level guidance provides feedback that better aligns with the evaluation of the reasoning process.

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Mingqian He, Yongliang Shen, Wenqi Zhang, Zeqi Tan, Weiming Lu. 2024-06-29. Advancing Process Verification for Large Language Models via Tree-Based Preference Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.00390

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