NLP Lineage

21 March 2022 · Reasoning

Self-consistency

Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning

X. Wang, J. Wei, D. Schuurmans, Q. Le, E. Chi, S. Narang, A. Chowdhery, D. Zhou

Date
21 March 2022
What the date marks
arXiv submission
Kind
Technique
Organisation
Google Research
Access
Not applicable
Other dates
ICLR 2023
Threads
In the guided tour
Chapter 12. Thinking longer
Learning phases
3. API usage and prompting

A milestone: 2 later milestones descend directly from it, and its descendants reach 6 of the 10 threads. How levels are decided

Read the primary source (arxiv.org)

Full summary in progress. Until then, this page shows the milestone's record from the research data.

What it changed

Before it

Chain of thought produced one reasoning path, decoded greedily.

The problem

A single path fails if any step goes wrong, and greedy decoding is arbitrary.

What it introduced

Sample many reasoning paths and take the most common final answer.

Why it matters

The cleanest demonstration that extra inference compute converts directly into accuracy.

What modern models inherit

Majority voting over samples, still a standard evaluation trick.

What came next

Tree of thoughts, verifier-guided search, and the reasoning models of 2024.

Before and after

The milestones it descends from, and the milestones that descend from it. Work developed alongside it is not counted. Weak links are left out unless you include them.

Before: where it came from

Self-consistency has 19 documented ancestors across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 10 turning points among them.

Self-consistency has 19 documented ancestors across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

Self-consistency has 28 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing its direct parents and the 10 turning points among them.

Self-consistency has 28 recorded ancestors, including indirect ones, across 6 chapters, reaching back to Recurrent networks in 1990. Showing all of them.

  1. 2022Self-consistencyThis milestone.
  2. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointSelf-consistency built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  4. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  5. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  6. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  7. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  8. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  9. 2017Transformer Turning pointGPT-2 built directly on this
    Sparse Transformer built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  10. 2016Layer normGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  11. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  12. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  13. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  14. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  15. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  16. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  17. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  18. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  19. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  20. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  1. 2022Self-consistencyThis milestone.
  2. 2022Chain of thought Turning pointSelf-consistency built directly on thisChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2020GPT-3 Turning pointChain of thought was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  4. 2020Scaling laws Turning pointGPT-3 was influenced by thisChapter 5. Scale becomes a science
  5. 2019Sparse Transformer Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  6. 2019GPT-2 Turning pointGPT-3 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  7. 2019WebTextGPT-2 was influenced by thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  8. 2019Transformer-XLSparse Transformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  9. 2018GPT-1GPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  10. 2018ELMoGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  11. 2018ULMFiTGPT-1 was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 4. Pretrain once, use everywhere
  12. 2017CoVeELMo was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  13. 2017Transformer Turning pointGPT-2 built directly on this
    Sparse Transformer built directly on this
    Scaling laws built directly on this    Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  14. 2017ConvS2STransformer was influenced by this (indirect influence)Chapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  15. 2016Layer normGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  16. 2015Residual connectionsTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  17. 2015LM pretraining Turning pointGPT-1 was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  18. 2015BPE tokenizationGPT-2 built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  19. 2015Luong attentionTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  20. 2014AdamTransformer was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  21. 2014GloVeELMo built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  22. 2014Seq2seq Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  23. 2014Attention Turning pointTransformer built directly on thisChapter 3. Attention, then only attention
  24. 2014GRU / encoder-decoderAttention built directly on thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  25. 2013word2vecELMo was influenced by thisChapter 2. Words become vectors
  26. 2011NLP from scratchELMo was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability
  27. 2003Neural LMNLP from scratch was influenced by this
    word2vec was influenced by this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  28. 1997LSTM Turning pointSeq2seq built directly on this
    ELMo built directly on this    Chapter 1. Language as probability
  29. 1990Recurrent networksLSTM was influenced by thisChapter 1. Language as probability

After: what it led to

Self-consistency has 9 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

Self-consistency has 9 documented descendants across 2 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

Self-consistency has 22 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 4 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing its direct descendants.

Self-consistency has 22 recorded descendants, including indirect ones, across 4 chapters, reaching forward to Qwen3.8 in 2026. Showing all of them.

  1. 2022Self-consistencyThis milestone.
  2. 2023Tree of thoughtswas influenced by Self-consistencyChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024Test-time computebuilt directly on Self-consistencyChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2025DeepSeek-R1was influenced by Test-time computeChapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2025Qwen3was influenced by DeepSeek-R1Chapter 8. The weights get out
  6. 2025IMO goldwas influenced by Test-time computeChapter 12. Thinking longer
  7. 2025IMO-ProofBenchwas influenced by IMO goldChapter 12. Thinking longer
  8. 2026Gemini 3 Deep Thinkwas influenced by IMO goldChapter 12. Thinking longer
  9. 2026Qwen3.5built directly on Qwen3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  10. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out
  1. 2022Self-consistencyThis milestone.
  2. 2023Tree of thoughtswas influenced by Self-consistencyChapter 12. Thinking longer
  3. 2024Test-time computebuilt directly on Self-consistencyChapter 12. Thinking longer
  4. 2024o3 announcedwas influenced by Test-time compute (indirect influence)Chapter 12. Thinking longer
  5. 2025DeepSeek-R1was influenced by Test-time computeChapter 12. Thinking longer
  6. 2025Deep researchwas influenced by o3 releasedChapter 13. Models that act
  7. 2025o3 releasedsucceeded o3 announcedChapter 12. Thinking longer
  8. 2025Qwen3was influenced by DeepSeek-R1Chapter 8. The weights get out
  9. 2025IMO goldwas influenced by Test-time computeChapter 12. Thinking longer
  10. 2025gpt-osswas influenced by DeepSeek-R1 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  11. 2025GPT-5built directly on o3 releasedChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  12. 2025GLM-4.5was influenced by DeepSeek-R1 (indirect influence)Chapter 8. The weights get out
  13. 2025IMO-ProofBenchwas influenced by IMO goldChapter 12. Thinking longer
  14. 2025GPT-5.1built directly on GPT-5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  15. 2025GPT-5.2built directly on GPT-5.1Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  16. 2026GPT-5.3-Codexbuilt directly on GPT-5.2Chapter 13. Models that act
  17. 2026Gemini 3 Deep Thinkwas influenced by IMO goldChapter 12. Thinking longer
  18. 2026Qwen3.5built directly on Qwen3Chapter 8. The weights get out
  19. 2026GPT-5.4built directly on GPT-5.3-CodexChapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  20. 2026GPT-5.5built directly on GPT-5.4Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  21. 2026GLM-5.2built directly on GLM-4.5Chapter 8. The weights get out
  22. 2026GPT-5.6 Solbuilt directly on GPT-5.5Chapter 14. Where the threads meet now
  23. 2026Qwen3.8built directly on Qwen3.5Chapter 8. The weights get out

Direct links and their sources

Where it came from

Built directly on

What it led to

Built on directly by

Influenced

Terms