Self-consistency for open-ended generations
Authors: name: Siddhartha Jain; name: Xiaofei Ma; name: Anoop Deoras; name: Bing Xiang
Published: 2023-07-11 17:51:48

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel approach for improving the quality and
consistency of generated outputs from large-scale pre-trained language models
(LLMs). Self-consistency has emerged as an effective approach for prompts with
fixed answers, selecting the answer with the highest number of votes. In this
paper, we introduce a generalized framework for self-consistency that extends
its applicability beyond problems that have fixed-answer answers. Through
extensive simulations, we demonstrate that our approach consistently recovers
the optimal or near-optimal generation from a set of candidates. We also
propose lightweight parameter-free similarity functions that show significant
and consistent improvements across code generation, autoformalization, and
summarization tasks, even without access to token log probabilities. Our method
incurs minimal computational overhead, requiring no auxiliary reranker models
or modifications to the existing model.