Papers › Large Language Models Can Self-Improve

Large Language Models Can Self-Improve

20 Oct 2022arXiv:2210.11610archive 2025-07-28

Jiaxin Huang, Shixiang Shane Gu, Le Hou, Yuexin Wu, Xuezhi Wang, Hongkun Yu, Jiawei Han

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 fine-tuning on reasoning is critical for self-improvement.

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Tasks

Arithmetic ReasoningCommon Sense ReasoningGSM8KNatural Language InferenceQuestion Answering

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) Accuracy 82.1 #62 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) Parameters (Billion) 540 #62 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) Accuracy 74.4 #88 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) Parameters (Billion) 540 #88 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) Accuracy 73.5 #96 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) Parameters (Billion) 540 #96 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) Accuracy 56.5 #125 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) Parameters (Billion) 540 #125 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 32.2 #146 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) Parameters (Billion) 540 #146 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 17.9 #154 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Arithmetic Reasoning GSM8K PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) Parameters (Billion) 540 #154 of 164 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) Accuracy 89.8 #7 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) Accuracy 88.7 #8 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) Accuracy 88.3 #9 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 87.2 #10 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 87.1 #11 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Common Sense Reasoning ARC (Challenge) PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) Accuracy 85.2 #15 of 54 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) A2 66.5 #20 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) A3 67.9 #20 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) A2 65.3 #21 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) A3 67.3 #21 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) A2 64.8 #22 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) A3 66.9 #22 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) A2 64.5 #23 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) A3 63.4 #23 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) A2 58.9 #24 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) A3 60.6 #24 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) A2 55.8 #25 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Natural Language Inference ANLI test PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) A3 55.8 #25 of 25 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering DROP PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) Accuracy 83 #1 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering DROP PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) Accuracy 78.2 #2 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering DROP PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) Accuracy 76.2 #3 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering DROP PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 71.7 #4 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering DROP PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) Accuracy 70.6 #5 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering DROP PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 60 #6 of 6 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering OpenBookQA PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Self Consistency) Accuracy 94.4 #3 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering OpenBookQA PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, CoT Prompting) Accuracy 93 #5 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering OpenBookQA PaLM 540B (Self Improvement, Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 92 #6 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering OpenBookQA PaLM 540B (Self Consistency) Accuracy 90 #8 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering OpenBookQA PaLM 540B (CoT Prompting) Accuracy 86.4 #15 of 45 Archive leaderboard report
Question Answering OpenBookQA PaLM 540B (Standard-Prompting) Accuracy 84.4 #17 of 45 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

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