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madaan / self-refine

LLMs can generate feedback on their work, use it to improve the output, and repeat this process iteratively.
https://selfrefine.info
Apache License 2.0
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Questions about initial generation #15

Open wj210 opened 1 year ago

wj210 commented 1 year ago

I want to use self-refine for reasoning task, such as open-book qa for example. For the few-shot examples for the initial generation. Does the examples have to be bad examples? If I have good examples, could I use them for the initial stage and hope that through iterations, it gets even better? However if i were to use already good examples, it might be tough to come up with even better ones in the few-shot examples for the refine stage?

madaan commented 1 year ago

Good question!

I think it depends on the task, and how much "prior" knowledge you expect the users to have.

For example, in tasks like dialog response generation and code optimization we provide a prompt that has all the information. Some other tasks, like code readability, only used an instruction.

In general, it is possible that a better engineered prompt will lead to a better initial output. But to be realistic, who wants to do endless prompt engineering? Isn't it better to start with something lightweight/minimal and let the model refine the outputs? 😄 That is the key point of the idea of Self-Refine.