Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) has unlocked significant reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, ICL with CoT examples is ineffective on novel tasks when the pre-training knowledge is insufficient. We study this problem in a controlled setting using the CoT-ICL Lab framework, and propose meta-training techniques to learn novel abstract reasoning tasks in-context. Although CoT examples facilitate reasoning, we noticed that their excessive inclusion during meta-training degrades performance when CoT supervision is limited. To mitigate such behavior, we propose CoT-Recipe, a formal approach to modulate the mix of CoT and non-CoT examples in meta-training sequences. We demonstrate that careful modulation via CoT-Recipe can increase the accuracy of transformers on novel tasks by up to 300% even when there are no CoT examples available in-context. We confirm the broader effectiveness of these techniques by applying them to pretrained LLMs (Qwen2.5 series) for symbolic reasoning tasks and observing gains of up to 130% in accuracy.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to be increasingly applied across various domains, their widespread adoption necessitates rigorous monitoring to prevent unintended negative consequences and ensure robustness. Furthermore, LLMs must be designed to align with human values, like preventing harmful content and ensuring responsible usage. The current automated systems and solutions for monitoring LLMs in production are primarily centered on LLM-specific concerns like hallucination etc, with little consideration given to the requirements of specific use-cases and user preferences. This paper introduces GAF-Guard, a novel agentic framework for LLM governance that places the user, the use-case, and the model itself at the center. The framework is designed to detect and monitor risks associated with the deployment of LLM based applications. The approach models autonomous agents that identify risks, activate risk detection tools, within specific use-cases and facilitate continuous monitoring and reporting to enhance AI safety, and user expectations. The code is available at https://github.com/IBM/risk-atlas-nexus-demos/tree/main/gaf-guard.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in various tasks, yet they still struggle with math reasoning. Despite efforts to optimize Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) prompts and fine-tune LLMs, the potential of few-shot learning remains unexplored. In this work, we propose CoT-Influx, a novel approach pushing the boundaries of few-shot CoT learning to improve LLM math reasoning capabilities. CoT-Influx addresses the challenges of the selection of useful examples and limited number of examples due to restricted context window length. Inspired by our observation that natural language inputs contain many redundancy, we propose a coarse-to-fine pruner as a plug-and-play module for LLMs, which first identifies as many crucial CoT examples as possible and then further prunes unimportant tokens within the context window. To train the pruner, we collect a math reasoning dataset with diverse difficulty and steps, introduce a reward to measure both the input's effectiveness for math reasoning and token length constraints, and propose a novel training approach with reinforcement learning. As a result, CoT-Influx significantly outperforms CoT and few-shot prompting baselines across various LLMs (LLaMA2-7B, 13B, 70B) and 5 mathematical datasets, achieving up to 4.55% absolute improvements. Remarkably, without any fine-tuning, LLaMA2-70B with CoT-Influx surpasses GPT-3.5 and a wide range of larger LLMs (PaLM, Minerva, etc.) on the GSM8K.

Large language models (LLMs) excel in many tasks in 2023, but they still face challenges in complex reasoning. Theory-of-mind (ToM) tasks, which require understanding agents' beliefs, goals, and mental states, are essential for common-sense reasoning involving humans, making it crucial to enhance LLM performance in this area. This study measures the ToM performance of GPT-4 and three GPT-3.5 variants (Davinci-2, Davinci-3, GPT-3.5-Turbo), and investigates the effectiveness of in-context learning in improving their ToM comprehension. We evaluated prompts featuring two-shot chain of thought reasoning and step-by-step thinking instructions. We found that LLMs trained with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) (all models excluding Davinci-2) improved their ToM accuracy via in-context learning. GPT-4 performed best in zero-shot settings, reaching nearly 80% ToM accuracy, but still fell short of the 87% human accuracy on the test set. However, when supplied with prompts for in-context learning, all RLHF-trained LLMs exceeded 80% ToM accuracy, with GPT-4 reaching 100%. These results demonstrate that appropriate prompting enhances LLM ToM reasoning, and they underscore the context-dependent nature of LLM cognitive capacities.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved excellent performances in various tasks. However, fine-tuning an LLM requires extensive supervision. Human, on the other hand, may improve their reasoning abilities by self-thinking without external inputs. In this work, we demonstrate that an LLM is also capable of self-improving with only unlabeled datasets. We use a pre-trained LLM to generate "high-confidence" rationale-augmented answers for unlabeled questions using Chain-of-Thought prompting and self-consistency, and fine-tune the LLM using those self-generated solutions as target outputs. We show that our approach improves the general reasoning ability of a 540B-parameter LLM (74.4% 82.1% on GSM8K, 78.2% 83.0% on DROP, 90.0% 94.4% on OpenBookQA, and 63.4% 67.9% on ANLI-A3) and achieves state-of-the-art-level performance, without any ground truth label. We conduct ablation studies and show that finetuning on reasoning is critical for self-improvement. Scaling has enabled Large Language ...