LLMs are powerful tools, but they often struggle with tasks that require logical and algorithmic reasoning, such as arithmetic. A team of researchers from Google has developed a new technique to teach LLMs how to perform arithmetic operations by using in-context learning and algorithmic prompting. Algorithmic prompting means that the model is given detailed explanations of each step of the algorithm, such as addition or multiplication. The researchers showed that this technique can improve the performance of LLMs on arithmetic problems that are much harder than those seen in the examples. They also demonstrated that LLMs can use algorithmic reasoning to solve complex word problems by interacting with other models that have different skills. This work suggests that LLMs can learn algorithmic reasoning as a skill and apply it to various tasks.

Results from the paper comparing their approach vs. other prompting techniques.