Use LLMs ThemSelves to Create Step Back Prompts

Step back prompts are prompts that ask LLMs to take a step back, think and reason about the bigger context before answering the question.

They force the LLMs to think about the context before answering the original question.

The step back prompting technique is depicted below

However the problem is that creating a step back prompt itself is additional work for humans. How about we ask LLMs to create step back prompts for us, give it a few examples ?

Here is how it works , I used Rivet for the demo.

Let’s say we have the below question to answer

Instead of asking LLM to answer, first we would ask LLM to create a step back question for the above question

It creates the step back question

Now put that question back to LLM along with the original question

And you will get a much better answer :)