A breakthrough approach in enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) has been unveiled by researchers from Google DeepMind and the University of Southern California.

Their new ‘SELF-DISCOVER’ prompting framework – published this week on arXiV and Hugging Face – represents a significant leap beyond existing techniques, potentially revolutionising the performance of leading models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s PaLM 2.

The framework promises substantial enhancements in tackling challenging reasoning tasks. It demonstrates remarkable improvements, boasting up to a 32% performance increase compared to traditional methods like Chain of Thought (CoT). This novel approach revolves around LLMs autonomously uncovering task-intrinsic reasoning structures to navigate complex problems.

At its core, the framework empowers LLMs to self-discover and utilise various atomic reasoning modules – such as critical thinking and step-by-step analysis – to construct explicit reasoning structures.

By mimicking human problem-solving strategies, the framework operates in two stag