Large Language Models Can Self-Improve

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-Though (CoT) prompting and self-consistency, and finetune the LLM using those self-generated solutions as target outputs. We show that without any ground truth label, our approach significantly improves the general reasoning ability of PaLM 540B model (74.4%→82.1% on GSM8K, 90.0%→94.4% on OpenBookQA, and 63.4%→67.9% on ANLI-A3) and can also be adapted to extreme low-resource cases where even training questions and CoT prompts are limited. We conduct ablation studies and show that fine-tuning on diverse reasoning paths is critical for self-improvement.