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Self-Consistency(SC)
Samples multiple diverse chain-of-thought paths at nonzero temperature, then aggregates their final answers by majority or confidence-weighted vote. Because a correct answer tends to be reached by many different reasoning paths while individual mistakes scatter, the consensus answer is far more reliable than any single greedy decode.
In 30 seconds
- What
- Samples multiple reasoning paths at nonzero temperature, then selects the final answer by majority vote or confidence weighting.
- When to use
- Problems with verifiable correct answers where diverse reasoning paths exist and errors scatter across samples.
- Watch out
- Requires N times more inference cost; majority vote fails if most paths converge on the same wrong answer.
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Self-Consistency: Overview
Samples multiple diverse chain-of-thought paths at nonzero temperature, then aggregates their final answers by majority or confidence-weighted vote. Because a correct answer tends to be reached by many different reasoning paths while individual mistakes scatter, the consensus answer is far more reliable than any single greedy decode.
- Samples N independent reasoning paths at nonzero temperature
- Marginalizes over reasoning by voting on final answers only
- Majority or confidence-weighted aggregation of candidates
- Correct answers converge while sporadic errors are outvoted
- Foundation of best-of-N test-time compute scaling
- Universal Self-Consistency extends voting to free-form outputs
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References
The papers, specifications, and repositories this pattern is based on.
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