Physics of Language Models: Part 2.2, How to Learn From Mistakes on
  Grade-School Math Problems
Authors: name: Tian Ye; name: Zicheng Xu; name: Yuanzhi Li; name: Zeyuan Allen-Zhu
Published: 2024-08-29 06:49:20

Abstract: Language models have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving reasoning
tasks; however, even the strongest models still occasionally make reasoning
mistakes. Recently, there has been active research aimed at improving reasoning
accuracy, particularly by using pretrained language models to "self-correct"
their mistakes via multi-round prompting. In this paper, we follow this line of
work but focus on understanding the usefulness of incorporating
"error-correction" data directly into the pretraining stage. This data consists
of erroneous solution steps immediately followed by their corrections. Using a
synthetic math dataset, we show promising results: this type of pretrain data
can help language models achieve higher reasoning accuracy directly (i.e.,
through simple auto-regression, without multi-round prompting) compared to
pretraining on the same amount of error-free data. We also delve into many
details, such as (1) how this approach differs from beam search, (2) how such
data can be prepared, (3) whether masking is needed on the erroneous tokens,
(4) the amount of error required, (5) whether such data can be deferred to the
fine-tuning stage, and many others.