SatLM: Satisfiability-Aided Language Models Using Declarative Prompting

Prior work has combined chain-of-thought prompting in large language models (LLMs) with programmatic representations to perform effective and transparent reasoning. While such an approach works well for tasks that only require forward reasoning (e.g., straightforward arithmetic), it is less effective for constraint solving problems that require more sophisticated planning and search. In this paper, we propose a new satisfiability-aided language modeling (SatLM) approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We use an LLM to generate a declarative task specification rather than an imperative program and leverage an off-the-shelf automated theorem prover to derive the final answer. This approach has two key advantages.