Training Chain-of-Thought via Latent-Variable Inference
Authors: name: Du Phan, name: Matthew D. Hoffman, name: David Dohan, name: Sholto Douglas, name: Tuan Anh Le, name: Aaron Parisi, name: Pavel Sountsov, name: Charles Sutton, name: Sharad Vikram, name: Rif A. Saurous

Large language models (LLMs) solve problems more accurately and interpretably
when instructed to work out the answer step by step using a
``chain-of-thought'' (CoT) prompt. One can also improve LLMs' performance on a
specific task by supervised fine-tuning, i.e., by using gradient ascent on some
tunable parameters to maximize the average log-likelihood of correct answers
from a labeled training set. Naively combining CoT with supervised tuning
requires supervision not just of the correct answers, but also of detailed
rationales that lead to those answers; these rationales are expensive to
produce by hand. Instead, we propose a fine-tuning strategy that tries to
maximize the marginal log-likelihood of generating a correct answer
using CoT prompting, approximately averaging over all possible rationales. The
core challenge is sampling from the posterior over rationales conditioned on
the correct answer; we address it using a simple Markov-chain Monte Carlo
(MCMC) expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm inspired by the self-taught
reasoner (STaR), memoized wake-sleep, Markovian score climbing, and persistent
contrastive divergence. This algorithm also admits a novel control-variate
technique that drives the variance of our gradient estimates to zero as the
model improves. Applying our technique to GSM8K and the tasks in BIG-Bench
Hard, we find that this MCMC-EM fine-tuning technique typically improves the
model's accuracy on held-out examples more than STaR or prompt-tuning with or
without CoT.