War of Thoughts: Competition Stimulates Stronger Reasoning in Large Language Models

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of reasoning tasks, particularly through test-time scaling (TTS) to enhance LLM reasoning.Prior research has used structures such as trees or graphs to guide LLMs in searching for optimal solutions.These methods are time-consuming and require a strong reward model (RM) to support effective solution space exploration.Tournament-style approaches eliminate the reliance on RMs through comparative evaluation but suffer from transitivity dilemmas, leading to unstable ordering.To address these issues, we propose War of Thoughts (WoT), a novel post-hoc method that enhances reasoning without finetuning.WoT comprises two distinct stages: (1) Exploration, in which diverse and meaningful candidate solutions are generated through contrastive demonstrations and multigranularity reasoning specifications; and (2) Competition, where these candidate solutions are subjected to multiple rounds of matchups within a competitive arena.Throughout this iterative process, the solutions are optimized and improved, with the optimal solution being determined based on Elo ratings.Extensive experiments across various LLMs demonstrate the superiority of WoT, surpassing baselines by 10-30%.WoT can effectively stimulate stronger reasoning abilities, achieving impressive TTS performance in both generation budget and model size.It shows higher scalability efficiency compared to the baseline within the same budget.Notably, WoT exhibits excellent scalability with model size, even outperforming a 72B model despite using a 7B model.4 Compete for the Best Solution 3 Produce Grouped Kickoff Solutions 2 Generate Contrastive Demonstrations 1 Obtain Task-specific Common Errors LLM LLM Question: What is the sum of all values of for which the expression +6 2 -5+4 is undefined?Answer: The given expression is undefined when Demonstration Logical Reasoning Error: occurs when there is a fault in the logical progression or assumptions Conceptual Misunderstanding: occurs when there is an incorrect interpretation of a key concept Calculation Error: occurs when an arithmetic mistake, unit conversion error, or