Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration

Zhenhailong Wang, Shaoguang Mao, Wenshan Wu, Tao Ge, Furu Wei, Heng Ji

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Human intelligence thrives on cognitive synergy, where collaboration among different minds yield superior outcomes compared to isolated individuals. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist is an intelligent agent that collaboratively combines multiple minds’ strengths and knowledge to enhance problem-solving in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. Our in-depth analysis shows that assigning multiple fine-grained personas in LLMs improves problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, experimental results demonstrate that SPP effectively reduces factual hallucination, and maintains strong reasoning capabilities. Additionally, comparative experiments show that cognitive synergy only emerges in GPT-4 and does not appear in less capable models, such as GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-13b-chat, which draws an interesting analogy to human development.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationLong Papers
EditorsKevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages257-279
Number of pages23
ISBN (Electronic)9798891761148
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2024 - Hybrid, Mexico City, Mexico
Duration: Jun 16 2024Jun 21 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2024
Volume1

Conference

Conference2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL 2024
Country/TerritoryMexico
CityHybrid, Mexico City
Period6/16/246/21/24

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Information Systems
  • Software

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