Questions about initial generation

[wj210]

I want to use self-refine for reasoning task, such as open-book qa for example.
For the few-shot examples for the initial generation. Does the examples have to be bad examples?
If I have good examples, could I use them for the initial stage and hope that through iterations, it gets even better?
However if i were to use already good examples, it might be tough to come up with even better ones in the few-shot examples for the refine stage?

[madaan]

Good question!

I think it depends on the task, and how much "prior" knowledge you expect the users to have.

For example, in tasks like dialog response generation and code optimization we provide a prompt that has all the information. Some other tasks, like code readability, only used an instruction.

In general, it is possible that a better engineered prompt will lead to a better initial output. But to be realistic, who wants to do endless prompt engineering? Isn't it better to start with something lightweight/minimal and let the model refine the outputs? 😄 That is the key point of the idea of Self-Refine.