Self-correction has emerged as a promising solution to boost the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), where LLMs refine their solutions using self-generated critiques that pinpoint the errors. This work explores whether small (<= 13B) language models (LMs) have the ability of self-correction on reasoning tasks with minimal inputs from stronger LMs. We propose a novel pipeline that prompts smaller LMs to collect self-correction data that supports the training of self-refinement abilities. First, we leverage correct solutions to guide the model in critiquing their incorrect responses. Second, the generated critiques, after filtering, are used for supervised fine-tuning of the self-correcting reasoner through solution refinement. Our experimental results show improved self-correction abilities of two models on five datasets spanning math and commonsense reasoning, with notable performance gains when paired with a strong GPT-4-based verifier, though limitations are identified when using a weak self-verifier for determining when to correct.
@article{arxiv.2404.17140,
title = {Small Language Models Need Strong Verifiers to Self-Correct Reasoning},
author = {Yunxiang Zhang and Muhammad Khalifa and Lajanugen Logeswaran and Jaekyeom Kim and Moontae Lee and Honglak Lee and Lu Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.17140},
year = {2024}
}