Can LLMs Learn from Previous Mistakes? Investigating LLMs' Errors to
  Boost for Reasoning
Yongqi Tong Dawei Li Sizhe Wang Yujia Wang Fei Teng Jingbo Shang
Recent works have shown the benefits to LLMs from fine-tuning golden-standard
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) rationales or using them as correct examples in few-shot
prompting. While humans can indeed imitate correct examples, learning from our
mistakes is another vital aspect of human cognition. Hence, a question
naturally arises: \textit{can LLMs learn and benefit from their mistakes,
especially for their reasoning? } This study investigates this problem from
both the prompting and model-tuning perspectives. We begin by introducing
\textsc{CoTErrorSet}, a new benchmark with 609,432 questions, each designed
with both correct and error references, and demonstrating the types and reasons
for making such mistakes. To explore the effectiveness of those mistakes, we
design two methods: (1) \textbf{Self-rethinking} prompting guides LLMs to
rethink whether they have made similar previous mistakes; and (2)
\textbf{Mistake tuning} involves finetuning models in both correct and
incorrect reasoning domains, rather than only tuning models to learn ground
truth in traditional methodology. We conduct a series of experiments to prove
LLMs can obtain benefits from mistakes in both directions. Our two methods
offer potentially cost-effective strategies by leveraging errors to enhance
reasoning capabilities, which costs significantly less than creating
meticulously hand-crafted golden references. We ultimately make a thorough
analysis of the reasons behind LLMs' errors, which provides directions that
future research needs to overcome. \textsc{CoTErrorSet} will be published soon
on \texttt{Anonymity Link}.