Chain-of-Action: Faithful and Multimodal Question Answering through Large Language Models
Zhenyu Pan, Haozheng Luo, Manling Li, Han Liu
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- github.com/MAGICS-LAB/Chain-of-ActionsOfficialpytorch★ 7
Abstract
We present a Chain-of-Action (CoA) framework for multimodal and retrieval-augmented Question-Answering (QA). Compared to the literature, CoA overcomes two major challenges of current QA applications: (i) unfaithful hallucination that is inconsistent with real-time or domain facts and (ii) weak reasoning performance over compositional information. Our key contribution is a novel reasoning-retrieval mechanism that decomposes a complex question into a reasoning chain via systematic prompting and pre-designed actions. Methodologically, we propose three types of domain-adaptable `Plug-and-Play' actions for retrieving real-time information from heterogeneous sources. We also propose a multi-reference faith score (MRFS) to verify and resolve conflicts in the answers. Empirically, we exploit both public benchmarks and a Web3 case study to demonstrate the capability of CoA over other methods.
Tasks
Benchmark Results
| Dataset | Model | Metric | Claimed | Verified | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FEVER | CoA w/o actions | EM | 54.2 | — | Unverified |
| FEVER | DSP | EM | 62.2 | — | Unverified |
| FEVER | Self-Ask | EM | 64.2 | — | Unverified |
| FEVER | CoA | EM | 68.9 | — | Unverified |
| FEVER | Zero-shot | EM | 50 | — | Unverified |
| StrategyQA | CoA | EM | 79.2 | — | Unverified |
| StrategyQA | SearchChain | EM | 77 | — | Unverified |
| StrategyQA | CoA w/o actions | EM | 70.6 | — | Unverified |
| StrategyQA | Least-to-Most | EM | 65.8 | — | Unverified |
| TruthfulQA | CoA w/o actions | EM | 63.3 | — | Unverified |
| TruthfulQA | CoA | EM | 67.3 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | Self-Ask | EM | 31.1 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | ToT | EM | 26.3 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | Zero-shot | EM | 43 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | Few-shot | EM | 44.7 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | DSP | EM | 59.4 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | CoA w/o actions | EM | 64.7 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | CoT | EM | 42.5 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | CoA | EM | 70.7 | — | Unverified |
| WebQuestions | React | EM | 38.3 | — | Unverified |