# Dialectical Behavior Therapy Approach to LLM Prompting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07768 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07768/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 10 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Oct 2024.

## 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, 10 of 10)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [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)
- [Scaling Language Models: Methods, Analysis & Insights from Training Gopher](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11446/) (2021)
- [Are NLP Models really able to Solve Simple Math Word Problems?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07191/) (2021)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Program Induction by Rationale Generation : Learning to Solve and Explain Algebraic Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.04146/) (2017)
- [Gromov-Wasserstein unsupervised alignment reveals structural correspondences between the color similarity structures of humans and large language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04381/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models demonstrated state-of-the-art results on various reasoning tasks when applying the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting technique. CoT prompting guides the model into breaking tasks into a few intermediate steps and provides step-by-step demonstrations. However, solving complex reasoning tasks remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel prompting strategy inspired by Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). DBT, a form of cognitive-behavioral therapy, aims to help individuals cope with stress by developing a system of reasoning. We applied DBT's basic concepts of shaping dialog to construct prompts and conducted experiments on different datasets and LLMs with various numbers of parameters. Our results show that prompts crafted with DBT techniques significantly improve results on smaller models, achieving a 7% increase in accuracy on the StrategyQA, 4.8% on Aqua dataset using 8b parameters model, and a 16.2% increase on the StrategyQA, 5.3% on GSM8K dataset with 14b parameters model.