Self-Reflection on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract: A strong capability of large language models is Chain-of-Thought reasoning. Prompting a model to ‘think step-by-step’ has led to great performance improvements in solving problems such as planning and question answering, and with the extended output it provides some evidence about the rationale behind an answer or decision. In search of better, more robust, and interpretable language model behavior, this work investigates self-reflection in large language models. Here, self-reflection consists of feedback from large language models to medical question-answering and whether the feedback can be used to accurately distinguish between correct and incorrect answers. GPT-3.5-Turbo and GPT-4 provide zero-shot feedback scores to Chain-of-Thought reasoning on the MedQA (medical questionanswering) dataset. The question-answering is evaluated on traits such as being structured, relevant and consistent. We test whether the feedback scores are different for questions that were either correctly or incorrectly answered by Chain-of-Thought reasoning. The potential differences in feedback scores are statistically tested with the Mann-Whitney U test. Graphical visualization and logistic regressions are performed to preliminarily determine whether the feedback scores are indicative to whether the Chain-of-Thought reasoning leads to the right answer. The results indicate that among the reasoning objectives, the feedback models assign higher feedback scores to questions that were answered correctly than those that were answered incorrectly. Graphical visualization shows potential for reviewing questions with low feedback scores, although logistic regressions that aimed to predict whether or not questions were answered correctly mostly defaulted to the majority class. Nonetheless, there seems to be a possibility for more robust output from self-reflecting language systems.