Large Language Model Programs
Authors: name: Imanol Schlag; name: Sainbayar Sukhbaatar; name: Asli Celikyilmaz; name: Wen-tau Yih; name: Jason Weston; name: Jürgen Schmidhuber; name: Xian Li
Published: 2023-05-09 11:55:36

Abstract: In recent years, large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated
the ability to follow instructions and perform novel tasks from a few examples.
The possibility to parameterise an LLM through such in-context examples widens
their capability at a much lower cost than finetuning. We extend this line of
reasoning and present a method which further expands the capabilities of an LLM
by embedding it within an algorithm or program. To demonstrate the benefits of
this approach, we present an illustrative example of evidence-supported
question-answering. We obtain a 6.4\% improvement over the chain of thought
baseline through a more algorithmic approach without any finetuning.
Furthermore, we highlight recent work from this perspective and discuss the
advantages and disadvantages in comparison to the standard approaches.