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PAL: Program-aided Language Models

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34 Pith papers citing it
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abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated an impressive ability to perform arithmetic and symbolic reasoning tasks, when provided with a few examples at test time ("few-shot prompting"). Much of this success can be attributed to prompting methods such as "chain-of-thought'', which employ LLMs for both understanding the problem description by decomposing it into steps, as well as solving each step of the problem. While LLMs seem to be adept at this sort of step-by-step decomposition, LLMs often make logical and arithmetic mistakes in the solution part, even when the problem is decomposed correctly. In this paper, we present Program-Aided Language models (PAL): a novel approach that uses the LLM to read natural language problems and generate programs as the intermediate reasoning steps, but offloads the solution step to a runtime such as a Python interpreter. With PAL, decomposing the natural language problem into runnable steps remains the only learning task for the LLM, while solving is delegated to the interpreter. We demonstrate this synergy between a neural LLM and a symbolic interpreter across 13 mathematical, symbolic, and algorithmic reasoning tasks from BIG-Bench Hard and other benchmarks. In all these natural language reasoning tasks, generating code using an LLM and reasoning using a Python interpreter leads to more accurate results than much larger models. For example, PAL using Codex achieves state-of-the-art few-shot accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing PaLM-540B which uses chain-of-thought by absolute 15% top-1. Our code and data are publicly available at http://reasonwithpal.com/ .

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representative citing papers

RepairAgent: An Autonomous, LLM-Based Agent for Program Repair

cs.SE · 2024-03-25 · conditional · novelty 8.0

RepairAgent autonomously repairs 164 bugs on Defects4J including 39 not fixed by prior techniques by treating an LLM as an agent that invokes tools via a finite state machine and dynamic prompts.

CaTS-Bench: Can Language Models Describe Time Series?

cs.LG · 2025-09-25 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Introduces CaTS-Bench with human gold-standard captions and a synthetic generation pipeline to evaluate vision-language models on time series captioning and numeric reasoning.

ViperGPT: Visual Inference via Python Execution for Reasoning

cs.CV · 2023-03-14 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

ViperGPT generates executable Python code to compose pre-trained vision-and-language modules into programs that answer visual queries, reaching state-of-the-art results with no additional training.

Teaching Language Models to Think in Code

cs.CL · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0 · 2 refs

ThinC trains small models to reason primarily in code rather than natural language, outperforming tool-integrated baselines and even larger models on competition math benchmarks.

The Self-Correction Illusion: LLMs Correct Others but Not Themselves

cs.AI · 2026-06-04 · conditional · novelty 6.0

Relabeling an identical erroneous claim from the model's own thought role to an external chat role increases explicit correction rates by 23-93 percentage points across 13 model-domain cells, indicating a chat-template artifact rather than a cognitive deficit.

Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics

cs.CL · 2023-10-16 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Continued pretraining of Code Llama on Proof-Pile-2 yields Llemma, an open math-specialized LLM that beats known open base models on MATH and supports tool use plus formal proving out of the box.

ToRA: A Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent for Mathematical Problem Solving

cs.CL · 2023-09-29 · conditional · novelty 6.0

ToRA trains language models on interactive tool-use trajectories with imitation learning and output shaping to integrate reasoning and external tools, yielding 13-19% gains on math datasets and new highs like 44.6% on MATH for a 7B model.

Teaching Large Language Models to Self-Debug

cs.CL · 2023-04-11 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Self-Debugging teaches LLMs to identify and fix their own code errors through rubber-duck-style natural language explanations and execution feedback, delivering 2-12% gains over baselines on Spider, TransCoder, and MBPP.

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