Federated Prompting and Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Improving LLMs Answering

We investigate how to enhance answer precision in frequently asked questions posed by distributed users using cloud-based LLMs. Our study focuses on a typical situations where users ask similar queries that involve identical mathematical reasoning steps and problem-solving procedures. Due to the unsatisfactory accuracy of LLMs' zero-shot prompting with standalone questions, we propose to improve the distributed synonymous questions using Self-Consistency (SC) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. Specifically, we first retrieve synonymous questions from a crowd-sourced database and create a federated question pool. We call these federated synonymous questions with the same or different parameters SP-questions or DP-questions, respectively. We refer to our methods as Fed-SP-SC and Fed-DP-CoT, which can generate significantly more accurate answers for all user queries without requiring sophisticated model-tuning. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed methods can significantly enhance question accuracy by fully exploring the synonymous nature of the questions and the consistency of the answers.