Chain of Code: Reasoning with a Language Model-Augmented Code Emulator
Authors: name: Chengshu Li; name: Jacky Liang; name: Andy Zeng; name: Xinyun Chen; name: Karol Hausman; name: Dorsa Sadigh; name: Sergey Levine; name: Li Fei-Fei; name: Fei Xia; name: Brian Ichter
Published: 2023-12-07 17:51:43

Abstract: Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and
perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter - we
hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve
Chain of Thought reasoning not only for logic and arithmetic tasks, but also
for semantic ones (and in particular, those that are a mix of both). For
example, consider prompting an LM to write code that counts the number of times
it detects sarcasm in an essay: the LM may struggle to write an implementation
for "detect_sarcasm(string)" that can be executed by the interpreter (handling
the edge cases would be insurmountable). However, LMs may still produce a valid
solution if they not only write code, but also selectively "emulate" the
interpreter by generating the expected output of "detect_sarcasm(string)". In
this work, we propose Chain of Code (CoC), a simple yet surprisingly effective
extension that improves LM code-driven reasoning. The key idea is to encourage
LMs to format semantic sub-tasks in a program as flexible pseudocode that the
interpreter can explicitly catch undefined behaviors and hand off to simulate
with an LM (as an "LMulator"). Experiments demonstrate that Chain of Code
outperforms Chain of Thought and other baselines across a variety of
benchmarks; on BIG-Bench Hard, Chain of Code achieves 84%, a gain of 12% over
Chain of Thought. In a nutshell, CoC broadens the scope of reasoning questions
that LMs can answer by "thinking in code".