Most people are beginning to know just how indispensable LLMs are in addressing complex reasoning tasks. Still, similar to humans, they do make mistakes from time to time. Self-correction is a top priority to ensure artificial intelligence systems can function effectively. A surge in methodologies has emerged to address self-correction, with an emphasis on the LLM’s ability to identify problems in its own output and subsequently improve based on feedback.
To break this down further, the Google Research team set out to separate self-correction into two components: mistake finding and output correction. They conducted a study, “LLMs cannot find reasoning errors, but can correct them!” to test cutting-edge LLMs on mistake finding and output correction independently.
The study introduced a new benchmark dataset, BIG-Bench Mistake, to assess the LLMs’ capacity to identify errors. This dataset targets domains outside of mathematics, an area often overlooked in existing evaluation tasks.
The study aimed to answer several key questions:
1. Can LLMs find logical mistakes in Chain-of-Thought style reasoning?
2. Can mistake-finding be used to gauge the correctness of the answer?
3. Can LLMs backtrack knowing where the error is?
4. Can mistake finding apply to tasks the LLMs have never encountered?
The findings suggested that state-of-the-art LLMs struggled with identifying even simple mistakes, indicating their limited ability to self-correct reasoning errors. Furthermore, mistake-finding did not necessarily align with correctness in the LLMs’ answers.
However, the team proposed a backtracking method that showed promise in correcting errors, despite LLMs’ initial poor performance in mistake finding. This simple method, known as BIG-Bench Mistake, aims to minimize the losses from correcting wrong answers than gains resulting from changing right answers to wrong answers.
The research not only highlighted the challenges in LLMs’ ability to self-correct but also introduced a benchmark dataset to pave the way for future advancements in natural language processing.