Thought-Like-Pro: Enhancing Reasoning of Large Language Models through Self-Bootstrapped Prolog-based Chain-of-Thought

Abstract

Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities as general-purpose assistants, excelling in a wide range of reasoning tasks and supporting various aspects of daily web usage. This achievement represents a significant step toward achieving artificial general intelligence. Despite these advancements, the effectiveness of large language models often hinges on the specific prompting strategies employed, and there remains a lack of a robust framework to facilitate learning and generalization across diverse reasoning tasks. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel learning framework, Thought-Like-Pro. In this framework, we utilize imitation learning to imitate the Chain-of-Thought process which is verified and translated from reasoning trajectories generated by a symbolic Prolog logic engine. This framework proceeds in a prompt-guided but self-bootstrapped manner, that enables large language models to formulate rules and statements from given instructions and leverage the symbolic Prolog engine to derive results. Subsequently, large language models convert Prolog-derived successive reasoning trajectories into natural language chain-of-thought for imitation learning. The empirical findings indicate that our proposed approach greatly improves the reasoning capacity of large language models. By employing model averaging techniques, our method exhibits only a marginal decline in performance for distributional extrapolation tasks, showing robust generalization capabilities. We present a technical approach that integrates symbolic reasoning with language modeling, with the potential to support the development of large language models as cognitively inspired systems. The part of the dataset we used has been open-sourced.