Research map / Large language models / Agents, code and math
Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks
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Measured effects reported in the paper
| What was changed | Where | Measured | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| replace regex answer extraction after CoT with a GPT3 answer-extraction sub-task handler | CoT math reasoning · MultiArith | accuracy: +17 pts (78 to 95) | Helped |
| replace regex answer extraction after CoT with a GPT3 answer-extraction sub-task handler | CoT math reasoning · GSM8K | accuracy: +14 pts (36 to 50.6) | Helped |
| decompose letter concatenation into split, str_pos, merge sub-tasks instead of a single CoT | k-th letter concatenation · Letter concatenation (k=3, space delimiter, longer inputs) | exact match | Helped |
| recursive decomposition of list reversal (split halves) vs base CoT | List reversal with davinci-001 · Reversal, 4-10 items | exact match | Helped |
| unrolling the decomposition into a single CoT (rolled-out) for reversal (ablation) | List reversal · Reversal, longer lists | exact match | Hurt |
| fine-grained vs coarse-grained decomposition (more question-type sub-tasks) on CommaQA (ablation) | CommaQA-E · CommaQA-E | exact match | Helped |
| decomposition into sub-task handlers (vs CoT) on CommaQA-E | CommaQA-E · CommaQA-E (coarse and fine decomposition) | exact match | Helped |
| retrieval via Elasticsearch-based retrieve_odqa decomposition vs NoDecomp retrieval baseline (Flan-T5-XXL) | Open-domain multihop QA · 2WikiMultihopQA, MuSiQue, HotpotQA | answer F1 | Helped |
| Elasticsearch-based decomposed retrieval with Codex vs NoDecomp retrieval on HotpotQA | Open-domain multihop QA (Codex) · HotpotQA | answer F1 | No clear effect |
| decomposition with differently-structured sub-question generation (GPT3 generates each question instead of looping) for letter concatenation (ablation) | k-th letter concatenation · Letter concatenation | exact match | No clear effect |
| tail-recursive reversal (reverse(list[1:]) + head) instead of halving (ablation) | List reversal · Reversal, longer inputs | exact match | Mixed |
Closest papers by meaning
- Scaling Prompt Synthesis for Large Language Model Reasoning (ICML 2026 · similarity 0.89)
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- Improving Complex Reasoning with Dynamic Prompt Corruption: A Soft Prompt Optimization Approach (ICLR 2025 · similarity 0.88)
- Large Language Models as Analogical Reasoners (ICLR 2024 · similarity 0.88)
- StrategyLLM: Large Language Models as Strategy Generators, Executors, Optimizers, and Evaluators for Problem Solving (NeurIPS 2024 · similarity 0.88)
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