Paper ID: 2410.05915

Give me a hint: Can LLMs take a hint to solve math problems?

Vansh Agrawal, Pratham Singla, Amitoj Singh Miglani, Shivank Garg, Ayush Mangal

While many state-of-the-art LLMs have shown poor logical and basic mathematical reasoning, recent works try to improve their problem-solving abilities using prompting techniques. We propose giving "hints" to improve the language model's performance on advanced mathematical problems, taking inspiration from how humans approach math pedagogically. We also test the model's adversarial robustness to wrong hints. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating various LLMs, presenting them with a diverse set of problems of different difficulties and topics from the MATH dataset and comparing against techniques such as one-shot, few-shot, and chain of thought prompting.

Submitted: Oct 8, 2024