Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models

Authors: Xuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc Le, Ed Chi, Sharan Narang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Denny Zhou

Published March 21, 2022

Read the paper: arXiv 2307.11760 · PDF

Why it matters

In 2026 with fast / cheap inference, self-consistency is a free quality lever for any task with a discrete answer. Classification, extraction, yes/no -- sample 5x, vote, done. The only reasons not to use it are latency budgets and hard single-sample determinism requirements.

How to use it

Implement as a wrapper over your normal call path: run the same prompt N times at temperature=0.7, tally answers, return the plurality. For production use, pair with a confidence check -- if the plurality is thin, fall back to a smarter model.

Abstract

We propose a simple decoding strategy -- self-consistency -- which samples diverse reasoning paths and selects the most consistent answer by taking a majority vote.