Hint of Thought prompting: an explainable and zero-shot approach to reasoning tasks with LLMs

As a way of communicating with users and any LLMs like GPT or PaLM2, prompting becomes an increasingly important research topic for better utilization of LLMs. Although simple prompting performs well on single-step questions, it cannot permanently activate the correct knowledge path for multi-step reasoning tasks. The chain of thought (CoT), which often contains zero-shot CoT and few-shot CoT, is a recently developed prompting method that can explain the reasoning process to the LLM and outperforms simple prompting in three challenging reasoning tasks, including arithmetic, symbolic, and commonsense reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel hint of thought (HoT) prompting with explainability and zero-shot generalization. First, it is decomposed into the following three steps: explainable sub-questions, logical reasoning, and answer extraction. Second, such three steps are sequentially ordered in the format of step-by-step hints, which can be easily adjusted and explained to different tasks. Finally, experimental results demonstrate that our HoT prompting has a significant advantage on the zero-shot reasoning task compared to existing zero-shot CoT. We did zero-shot experiments on math tasks like GSM8K, ADDSUB, AQUA, SVAMP and commonsense tasks such as StrategyQA. In particular, the accuracy of the proposed HoT prompting is improved with GSM8K from 40.50% to 67.80%, with AQUA from 31.9% to 46.4%, with SVAMP from 63.7% to 76.9%, and with ADDSUB from 74.7% to 87.34%, respectively, which even defeats the competitive PoT approach on GSM8k, AQUA, and SVAMP.