# Resprompt: Residual Connection Prompting Advances Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.04743 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04743/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 50 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02311/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [HotpotQA: A Dataset for Diverse, Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09600/) (2018)
- [OPT: Open Pre-trained Transformer Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01068/) (2022)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15556/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07682/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Learn to Explain: Multimodal Reasoning via Thought Chains for Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09513/) (2022)
- [CommonsenseQA: A Question Answering Challenge Targeting Commonsense Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00937/) (2018)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [LaMDA: Language Models for Dialog Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08239/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14295/) (2024)
- [Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05695/) (2024)
- [Instance-adaptive Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20441/) (2024)
- [Mathematical Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.07622/) (2023)
- [Towards A Unified View of Answer Calibration for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09101/) (2023)
- [DCR: Divide-and-Conquer Reasoning for Multi-choice Question Answering with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05190/) (2024)
- [Evolutionary Pre-Prompt Optimization for Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04291/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which offers step-by-step problem-solving rationales, has impressively unlocked the reasoning potential of large language models (LLMs). Yet, the standard CoT is less effective in problems demanding multiple reasoning steps. This limitation arises from the complex reasoning process in multi-step problems: later stages often depend on the results of several steps earlier, not just the results of the immediately preceding step. Such complexities suggest the reasoning process is naturally represented as a graph. The almost linear and straightforward structure of CoT prompting, however, struggles to capture this complex reasoning graph. To address this challenge, we propose Residual Connection Prompting (RESPROMPT), a new prompting strategy that advances multi-step reasoning in LLMs. Our key idea is to reconstruct the reasoning graph within prompts. We achieve this by integrating necessary connections-links present in the reasoning graph but missing in the linear CoT flow-into the prompts. Termed "residual connections", these links are pivotal in morphing the linear CoT structure into a graph representation, effectively capturing the complex reasoning graphs inherent in multi-step problems. We evaluate RESPROMPT on six benchmarks across three diverse domains: math, sequential, and commonsense reasoning. For the open-sourced LLaMA family of models, RESPROMPT yields a significant average reasoning accuracy improvement of 12.5% on LLaMA-65B and 6.8% on LLaMA2-70B. Breakdown analysis further highlights RESPROMPT particularly excels in complex multi-step reasoning: for questions demanding at least five reasoning steps, RESPROMPT outperforms the best CoT based benchmarks by a remarkable average improvement of 21.1% on LLaMA-65B and 14.3% on LLaMA2-70B. Through extensive ablation studies and analyses, we pinpoint how to most effectively build residual connections.