Progressive-Hint Prompting Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks depends heavily on prompt design, with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and self-consistency being critical methods that en- hance this ability. However, these methods do not fully exploit the answers generated by the LLM to guide subsequent responses. This paper proposes a new prompting method, named Progressive-Hint Prompting (PHP), that enables automatic mul- tiple interactions between users and LLMs by using previously generated answers as hints to progressively guide toward the correct answers. PHP is orthogonal to CoT and self-consistency, making it easy to combine with state-of-the-art techniques to further improve performance. We conducted extensive and comprehensive experi- ments on seven benchmarks. The results show that PHP significantly improves accuracy while remaining highly efficient. For instance, with text- davinci-003, we observed a 4.2% improvement on GSM8K with greedy decoding compared to Complex CoT, and a 46.17% reduction in sam- ple paths with self-consistency. With GPT-4 and PHP, we achieve state-of-the-art performances on SVAMP (89.1% → 91.9%), GSM8K (92% → 95.5%), AQuA (76.4% → 79.9%) and MATH (50.3% → 53.9%).