Learning From Mistakes Makes LLM Better Reasoner
Authors: name: Shengnan An; name: Zexiong Ma; name: Zeqi Lin; name: Nanning Zheng; name: Jian-Guang Lou; name: Weizhu Chen
Published: 2023-10-31 17:52:22

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) recently exhibited remarkable reasoning
capabilities on solving math problems. To further improve this capability, this
work proposes Learning from Mistakes (LeMa), akin to human learning processes.
Consider a human student who failed to solve a math problem, he will learn from
what mistake he has made and how to correct it. Mimicking this error-driven
learning process, LeMa fine-tunes LLMs on mistake-correction data pairs
generated by GPT-4. Specifically, we first collect inaccurate reasoning paths
from various LLMs and then employ GPT-4 as a "corrector" to (1) identify the
mistake step, (2) explain the reason for the mistake, and (3) correct the
mistake and generate the final answer. Experimental results demonstrate the
effectiveness of LeMa: across five backbone LLMs and two mathematical reasoning
tasks, LeMa consistently improves the performance compared with fine-tuning on
CoT data alone. Impressively, LeMa can also benefit specialized LLMs such as
WizardMath and MetaMath, achieving 85.4% pass@1 accuracy on GSM8K and 27.1% on
MATH. This surpasses the SOTA performance achieved by non-execution open-source
models on these challenging tasks. Our code, data and models will be publicly
available at https://github.com/microsoft/CodeT.