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Longest branch method outperforms CoT-decoding in LLM response selection

A recent experiment explored different methods for selecting the best response from a large language model, comparing a simple "longest branch" approach against a more complex CoT-decoding technique. The experiment found that the "longest branch" method, which selects the branch with the most tokens without using log-probabilities, achieved a higher accuracy of 76.2% compared to CoT-decoding's 75.9%. This suggests that complex methods involving log-probability access and answer-span localization did not significantly improve performance over a simpler, free control method. AI

IMPACT Suggests simpler prompting strategies may be as effective as complex ones for certain LLM tasks.

RANK_REASON The item describes a novel experimental finding comparing different LLM prompting techniques. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]

Read on dev.to — LLM tag →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 1 sources. How we write summaries →

Longest branch method outperforms CoT-decoding in LLM response selection

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The item describes a novel experimental finding comparing different LLM prompting techniques. [lever_c_demoted from research: ic=1 ai=1.0]
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COVERAGE [1]

  1. dev.to — LLM tag TIER_1 English(EN) · Devanshu Biswas ·

    Taking the Longest Branch Scores 76.2% Against CoT-Decoding's 75.9%, So the Logprobs Bought Nothing

    <p>Sixty-six entries in this series changed the <strong>prompt</strong>. CoT-decoding (Wang &amp; Zhou, 2024) changes nothing about it. Branch the top-k <em>first</em> tokens instead of taking the argmax one, greedy-decode each, and several of those branches turn out to contain a…