Self-Consistency
Domain: Prompt Engineering
🎯 Motivation
Run the same CoT prompt multiple times and take the majority answer. If most runs agree, the answer is more likely correct.
📋 Concrete Example
Ask ‘What is 17 x 23?’ 5 times with CoT. Results: 391, 391, 391, 392, 391. Majority is 391. The one 392 is likely an error. Self-consistency filters it out.
🔗 Analogy
Asking 5 classmates to solve a math problem independently - if 4 say ‘391’ and 1 says ‘392’, you trust 391. The majority vote (self-consistency) is more reliable than any single answer.