English

Self-Training Meets Consistency: Improving LLMs' Reasoning with Consistency-Driven Rationale Evaluation

Machine Learning 2025-02-07 v4 Artificial Intelligence Computation and Language

Abstract

Self-training approach for large language models (LLMs) improves reasoning abilities by training the models on their self-generated rationales. Previous approaches have labeled rationales that produce correct answers for a given question as appropriate for training. However, a single measure risks misjudging rationale quality, leading the models to learn flawed reasoning patterns. To address this issue, we propose CREST (Consistency-driven Rationale Evaluation for Self-Training), a self-training framework that further evaluates each rationale through follow-up questions and leverages this evaluation to guide its training. Specifically, we introduce two methods: (1) filtering out rationales that frequently result in incorrect answers on follow-up questions and (2) preference learning based on mixed preferences from rationale evaluation results of both original and follow-up questions. Experiments on three question-answering datasets using open LLMs show that CREST not only improves the logical robustness and correctness of rationales but also improves reasoning abilities compared to previous self-training approaches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2411.06387,
  title  = {Self-Training Meets Consistency: Improving LLMs' Reasoning with Consistency-Driven Rationale Evaluation},
  author = {Jaehyeok Lee and Keisuke Sakaguchi and JinYeong Bak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2411.06387},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Accepted to NAACL 2025

R2 v1 2026-06-28T19:54:38.313Z