Self-Consistency Improves Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Editorial record

Plain-language summary

Self-consistency samples multiple diverse reasoning chains for the same question and then marginalizes over the reasoning to pick the answer most paths agree on. Because a correct answer tends to be reachable by several distinct valid derivations while errors are scattered, voting over sampled chains raised accuracy on arithmetic and commonsense benchmarks over standard chain-of-thought. It became a simple, decoding-time add-on for more reliable reasoning at the cost of extra samples.