Flow-of-Options: Diversified and Improved LLM Reasoning by Thinking Through Options

📅 2025-02-18
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
To address inherent biases in large language model (LLM) reasoning, this paper proposes Flow-of-Options (FoO), a framework that explicitly models diverse reasoning paths to enhance robustness and task adaptability. FoO introduces a novel “compressed interpretable representation” mechanism to enforce reasoning diversity and integrates case-based long-term memory for traceable solution generation and generalizable adaptation. The method unifies option-flow modeling, case-based reasoning, agent architecture, and multi-task adaptation to support autonomous machine learning (AutoML) task solving. Experiments demonstrate performance gains of 37.4%–69.2% on data science and therapeutic chemistry benchmarks, with per-task inference cost under $1. Furthermore, FoO successfully generalizes to reinforcement learning and image generation domains, validating its cross-modal applicability and scalability.

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📝 Abstract
We present a novel reasoning approach called Flow-of-Options (FoO), designed to address intrinsic biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). FoO enables LLMs to systematically explore a diverse range of possibilities in their reasoning, as demonstrated by an FoO-based agentic system for autonomously solving Machine Learning tasks (AutoML). Our framework outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving improvements of 38.2% - 69.2% on standard data science tasks, and 37.4% - 47.9% on therapeutic chemistry tasks. With an overall operation cost under $1 per task, our framework is well-suited for cost-sensitive applications. Beyond classification and regression, we illustrate the broader applicability of our FoO-based agentic system to tasks such as reinforcement learning and image generation. Our framework presents significant advancements compared to current state-of-the-art agentic systems for AutoML, due to the benefits of FoO in enforcing diversity in LLM solutions through compressed, explainable representations that also support long-term memory when combined with case-based reasoning.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

Address intrinsic biases in LLMs
Enhance reasoning diversity in LLMs
Improve AutoML task performance
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Flow-of-Options for LLM reasoning
Diverse exploration in AutoML tasks
Cost-effective with explainable representations
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