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Advanced Reasoning Techniques

Master advanced reasoning techniques for AI agents including chain-of-thought, tree of thoughts, and self-consistency

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Self-Consistency

Self-Consistency improves CoT by generating multiple reasoning paths (typically 5-10) and selecting the most consistent answer through majority voting. Different reasoning paths may reach different conclusions due to model uncertainty. Voting filters out random errors. Result: 30-50% error reduction compared to single-path CoT.

Interactive: Self-Consistency Voting

Generate multiple reasoning paths and see majority voting in action:

Click "Generate 5 Reasoning Paths" to see Self-Consistency in action

Implementation Details

1. Generate Multiple Paths
Use temperature=0.7-0.8 to introduce diversity. Generate 5-10 paths (more = higher accuracy but more cost).
2. Extract Answers
Parse final answer from each reasoning path. Handle different formats consistently.
3. Majority Voting
Count answer occurrences. Select most frequent. Break ties with confidence scores.
Results
GSM8K: 92% → 95% accuracy. CSQA: 85% → 91%. Arithmetic: 78% → 93%.
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Cost-Accuracy Trade-off

Self-Consistency costs 5-10x more than single CoT (5-10 API calls). Use when: high accuracy critical, errors costly, reasoning task difficult. Skip when: speed matters, budget limited, task simple. Sweet spot: 5 paths for most tasks, 10 paths for critical decisions.

← Tree of Thoughts