Meta-CoT: Generalizable Chain-of-Thought Prompting in Mixed-task Scenarios with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have unveiled remarkable reasoning capabilities by exploiting chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which generates intermediate reasoning chains to serve as the rationale for deriving the answer. However, current CoT methods either simply employ general prompts such as Let's think step by step, or heavily rely on handcrafted task-specific demonstrations to attain preferable performances, thereby engendering an inescapable gap between performance and generalization. To bridge this gap, we propose Meta-CoT, a generalizable CoT prompting method in mixed-task scenarios where the type of input questions is unknown. Meta-CoT firstly categorizes the scenario based on the input question and subsequently constructs diverse demonstrations from the corresponding data pool in an automatic pattern. Meta-CoT simultaneously enjoys remarkable performances on ten public benchmark reasoning tasks and superior generalization capabilities. Notably, Meta-CoT achieves the state-of-the-art result on SVAMP (93.7%) without any additional program-aided methods. Our further experiments on five out-of-distribution datasets verify the stability and generality of Meta-CoT.