Information Re-Organization Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models

Improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) has attracted considerable interest. Recent approaches primarily focus on improving the reasoning process to yield a more precise final answer. However, in scenarios involving contextually aware reasoning, these methods neglect the importance of first identifying logical relationships from the context before proceeding with the reasoning. This oversight could lead to a superficial understanding and interaction with the context, potentially undermining the quality and reliability of the reasoning outcomes. In this paper, we propose an information re-organization (InfoRE) method before proceeding with the reasoning to enhance the reasoning ability of LLMs. Our re-organization method involves initially extracting logical relationships from the contextual content, such as documents or paragraphs, and subsequently pruning redundant content to minimize noise. Then, we utilize the re-organized information in the reasoning process. This enables LLMs to deeply understand the contextual content by clearly perceiving these logical relationships, while also ensuring high-quality responses by eliminating potential noise. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving the reasoning ability, we conduct experiments using Llama2-70B, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4 on various contextually aware multi-hop reasoning tasks. Using only a zero-shot setting, our method achieves an average absolute improvement of 4% across all tasks, highlighting its potential to improve the reasoning performance of LLMs. Our source code is available at https://github.com/hustcxx/InfoRE.

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Peer review

Reviewer x5hg7/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-06

Summary

The paper proposes a simple yet effective method to work with most of the current reasoning strategies. It automatically organizes the content into structural form, excluding noises and unused information during this process. The experiments are done using three models across ten datasets. The method consistently improves a vanilla setting and also a CoT setting. Ablation study shows the effectiveness of both the extraction part and the pruning part.

Strengths

1. The method is compatible with other reasoning strategies such as CoT and can further improve them. The method is easy to follow implement. 2. The paper includes extensive experiments. The proposed method is verified on all the models (3 LLMs) across all selected tasks (10 datasets) and shows consistent improvement in all scenarios. 3. The ablation study shows that each of the two components in the proposed method can improve the overall performance independently.

Weaknesses

1. Do you consider trying gpt-3.5-0613/1106/0125 instead of text-davinci-003? The text-davinci-003 model is no longer usable in OpenAI APIs. 2. Some rationales need further explanation in the design of the proposed method. Do you consider using LLM for the information pruning part instead of a pre-trained BERT? Will there be any improvement if using LLM? Do you consider using an end-to-end model to do extraction and pruning at the same time? 3. It is great to see those analysis in section 5.2. It will greatly improve the insight of your paper if you can include: a. Will the extraction process introduce some hallucination? b. The paper focuses on zero-shot setting currently. How can few-shot setting help? It may help from two perspectives: (1) Better information extraction; (2) Better downstream task performance. c. The paper uses a very simple reasoning technique, the CoT prompting. Will the proposed method help in more advanced on such as ToT? 4. I am particularly interested in the aspect of minimizing noise. However, currently the experiments are done on dataset with normal data without many noises. Could you please try on something like web-crawled data? Another choice can be manually injecting some noises in the datasets you use, i.e., adding some meaningless tags (<a></a>), or some irrelevant sentences. I am interested to see how the proposed method can automatically exclude these noises. 5. Also, since the method can formulate the content in a structural data. Could you please try something like changing the order of sentences in the content? Will it affect how the method extract data? Minor suggestions to presentation: 1. A space is missing between “2” and “(” at line 125. 2. The “Large language models (LLMs)” appears at line 22, line 75, and line 353. Please do the abbreviation once at the beginning and use the abbreviation directly afterwards. Same suggestion applies to others like “Chain of Thought (CoT)” at line 190. 3. There seems to be an extra period in the “Prompt Content for Logical Relationship Extraction” in appendix A.

Questions

1. Why do you name the method RE-organization? I don’t see any other organization process before you’re the process of your method in the pipeline. Will it be more proper to name it “Information Organization?” 2. What version of LLaMA-2 are you using? The temperature of the hugging face version needs to be a positive value so it cannot be zero. 3. Line 317-319: Is it also because GPT-4 has a better ability to do the re-organization job than GPT-3? 4. Are the 100 wrong predictions you annotated randomly sampled? 5. Could you please give some mind map examples that LLM output in JSON format? Probably you can append them in the Appendix for a clear illustration.

Rating

7

Confidence

3

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Appreciation for Positive Feedback

Dear Reviewer x5hg, Thank you for your positive reassessment. We greatly appreciate your recognition and insightful suggestions. We will incorporate suggestions and additional analysis results into the revised paper to enhance its completeness and clarity. Once again, thank you for your time and effort in reviewing our paper. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out at any time. Best regards, The authors of InfoRE

Reviewer cK3D5/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-10

Summary

This paper proposes a method called information re-organization (InfoRE) to enhance the performance of large language models on some reasoning tasks. Unlike existing approaches that primarily focus on refining the reasoning process, InfoRE emphasizes re-organizing contextual information to identify logical relationships before reasoning. This method involves extracting logical relationships from the context and pruning redundant content to minimize noise. The re-organized information is then used in the reasoning process. The authors demonstrate the effectiveness of InfoRE through experiments on several contextually aware multi-hop reasoning tasks, achieving an average improvement of 4% in a zero-shot setting.

Strengths

- The idea of information re-organization is intuitive. - The demonstrated improvement in reasoning performance by an average of 4% across tasks, as well as the ablation study, verifies the functionality of the proposed method. - This paper is easy to follow.

Weaknesses

- The idea of this paper can be connected to existing prompt engineering works, e.g., performing retrieval from context and query/context rewriting. I feel this paper lacks technical depth (though this may be the fashion of a prompt engineering work, i.e., insightful but lacking technical depth). And the insight is not significant enough to compensate for the limited technical depth. - Though a 4% performance improvement may be considered significant, the baseline in this paper is quite weak (e.g., standard prompting or vanilla CoT). More baselines may need to be included and compared. - From the limited ablation study on 2WikiMultiHopQA, we can observe that the improvement from pruning is not significant. This makes me doubt whether such a complex/expensive design is really necessary.

Questions

See weaknesses.

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

2

Limitations

I don't see potential negative societal impact of this work.

Reviewer wQkW7/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-13

Summary

The paper introduces an "Information Re-organization" (InfoRE) method aimed at improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). It highlights the deficiencies of existing approaches that focus on intermediate reasoning steps without adequately addressing the preliminary organization of contextual information. The proposed InfoRE method involves extracting logical relationships and pruning redundant content from contextual data, guiding the reasoning process. This restructuring allows LLMs to recognize and use these logical relationships effectively, potentially enhancing reasoning quality. The method's efficacy is demonstrated using various LLMs like GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 across multiple reasoning tasks, showing an average improvement of 4% in performance.

Strengths

1. The paper introduces a novel method of restructuring information before reasoning, which could be foundational for future developments in LLM reasoning processes. 2. Results indicate that InfoRE significantly improves reasoning tasks across multiple datasets and model architectures. 3. The paper provides a comprehensive breakdown of the method's components and their contributions to the overall performance.

Weaknesses

1. Information extraction and pruning might require intricate tuning and be computationally expensive, making it less practical for real-time applications. 2. The paper is well structured. However, authors should provide more details about their experiments.

Questions

1. What are the differences between your extraction method and extracting to knowledge graph triples? Leveraging Structured Information ... (Li et al., EMNLP 2023) proposed a method to extract knowledge graph triples from documents. Moreover, you should add this paper to your related work since it also extracts knowledge from the document. 2. Since generations from LLMs always change, can you provide a standard variance or significant score of your results to show your improvement is substantial? 3. Do you limit the type of entities and relations during extraction? Do you apply open relations or closed relations during extraction? I only find the prompt in Appendix A. Is this all about your extraction part? 4. How do you check the completeness and quality of your extraction results? Can you provide more details about this? 5. LLM answers are always long, even with the format instruction. How do you compare your generated answers with golden answers? Do you apply exact match or other methods?

Rating

7

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

The paper adequately describes its limitations.

Reviewer wQkW2024-08-12

Reply to Rebuttal

Thank you for the response. It has solved my primary concern. I have updated my rating score.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Appreciation for Positive Feedback

Dear Reviewer wQkW, Thank you for your positive reassessment, and we appreciate your acknowledgment of our work. We are truly grateful for your insightful feedback throughout the entire review process, which has helped us further improve our work. Best regards, The authors of InfoRE

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

A Gentle Reminder

Dear Reviewer cK3D, Thank you for your efforts in reviewing our paper. We greatly value the feedback from each reviewer and have provided detailed responses to the concerns raised. Up to this point, we have received feedback from reviewers wQkW and x5hg, and are pleased to have their positive recognition. However, we have not yet received any feedback from you. As the discussion period is nearing its end, we would greatly appreciate it if you could let us know whether we have adequately addressed your concerns. Your insights are important to us, and we believe they will help us further improve the quality of our paper. Thank you once again for your time and consideration. Best regards, The authors of InfoRE

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-13

Appreciation for Reassessment

Dear Reviewer cK3D, Thank you for taking the time to reassess our work. We sincerely appreciate your patience and professionalism throughout the entire review process, which have been instrumental in helping us further improve our research. Once again, thank you for your time and effort in reviewing our paper. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out at any time. Best regards, The authors of InfoRE

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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