Plan of Thoughts: Heuristic-Guided Problem Solving with Large Language Models
<|reference_start|>Plan of Thoughts: Heuristic-Guided Problem Solving with Large Language Models: While language models (LMs) offer significant capability in zero-shot reasoning tasks across a wide range of domains, they do not perform satisfactorily in problems which requires multi-step reasoning. Previous approaches to mitigate this involves breaking a larger, multi-step task into sub-tasks and asking the language model to generate proposals ("thoughts") for each sub-task and using exhaustive planning approaches such as DFS to compose a solution. In this work, we leverage this idea to introduce two new contributions: first, we formalize a planning-based approach to perform multi-step problem solving with LMs via Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs), with the LM's own reflections about the value of a state used as a search heuristic; second, leveraging the online POMDP solver POMCP, we demonstrate a superior success rate of 89.4% on the Game of 24 task as compared to existing approaches while also offering better anytime performance characteristics than fixed tree-search which is used previously. Taken together, these contributions allow modern LMs to decompose and solve larger-scale reasoning tasks more effectively.<|reference_end|>
@article{liu2024plan,
    title={Plan of Thoughts: Heuristic-Guided Problem Solving with Large Language
  Models},
    author={Houjun Liu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19055},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.19055},
    primaryClass={cs.CL}
}