Self-Ask

Problem

Knowing each fact and being able to chain those facts together inside a single inference are different skills; this gap between them is the so-called compositionality gap. Without scaffolding, the model collapses the chain into a single step and either invents an answer or returns the wrong endpoint. Plain chain-of-thought helps a little, but the reasoning steps are not framed as questions, so the model cannot offload any of them to a search tool, and a human reader cannot easily inspect where in the chain the model went wrong.

Solution

Prompt the model to interleave sub-questions and their answers. Each sub-question is either answered by the model directly or by a search tool. The final answer is composed once all sub-questions are answered.

When to use

• The task is multi-hop and the model knows each hop in isolation.
• Compositionality gaps cause the model to skip combining facts.
• Sub-questions can be answered by the model or a search tool.