Papers › Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought

Answering Questions by Meta-Reasoning over Multiple Chains of Thought

25 Apr 2023arXiv:2304.13007archive 2025-07-28

Ori Yoran, Tomer Wolfson, Ben Bogin, Uri Katz, Daniel Deutch, Jonathan Berant

Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregating their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

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compute_exact_match oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/pred_evaluators/evaluation.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 86dcd04f5c5623f3 · report
normalize_text oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/pred_evaluators/evaluation.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · c30d6b506e3a5d6e · report
call_gpt oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/opeanai/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 63cfc8eb0c95d0dc · report
chunk_list_to_sublists oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/common/dataset_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · df23eac515d0b974 · report
compute_f1 oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/pred_evaluators/evaluation.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 9118271336e0821a · report
file_as_string oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/common/dataset_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 558f49bd6261449f · report
format_decompsition_break oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/dataclasses.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 787934785bc5bf80 · report
greenify oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/opeanai/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 3b07f989f0ffe622 · report
read_csv_to_dict oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/common/dataset_utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 10ff4bd5646b3677 · report
yellowfy oriyor/reasoning-on-cots/src/opeanai/utils.py official repository unverified MIT (permissive) · 5cd3899a28826ba7 · report

Tasks

Multi-hop Question AnsweringQuestion Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Answering Bamboogle MCR (code-davinci-002) + Google Search Accuracy 66.5 #2 of 9 Archive leaderboard report

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