The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning tasks depends heavily on prompt design, with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and self-consistency being critical methods that enhance this ability. However, these methods do not fully exploit the answers generated by the LLM to guide subsequent responses. This paper proposes a new prompting method, named Progressive-Hint Prompting (PHP), that enables automatic multiple interactions between users and LLMs by using previously generated answers as hints to progressively guide toward the correct answers. PHP is orthogonal to CoT and self-consistency, making it easy to combine with state-of-the-art techniques to further improve performance. We conducted an extensive and comprehensive evaluation to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Our experimental results on six benchmarks show that combining CoT and self-consistency with PHP significantly improves accuracy while remaining highly efficient. For instance, with text-davinci-003, we observed a 4.2% improvement on GSM8K with greedy decoding compared to Complex CoT, and a 46.17% reduction in sample paths with self-consistency. With GPT-4 and PHP, we achieve state-of-the-art performances on SVAMP (91.9%), GSM8K (95.5%) and AQuA (79.9%).

本文提出了一种名为“逐步提示”的新提示方法，它利用先前生成的答案作为提示，逐步引导用户与LLMs之间的自动多次交互，从而进一步提高了性能。 该方法在CoT和自一致性之外，具有正交性，易于与最先进的技术相结合进行综合评估，并在六个基准测试中获得了最佳性能。

渐进提示提高大型语言模型推理能力