Abstract

Human intelligence thrives on cognitive synergy, where collaboration among different minds yield superior outcomes compared to isolated individuals. In this work, we propose Solo Performance Prompting (SPP), which transforms a single LLM into a cognitive synergist by engaging in multi-turn self-collaboration with multiple personas. A cognitive synergist is an intelligent agent that collaboratively combines multiple minds’ strengths and knowledge to enhance problem-solving in complex tasks. By dynamically identifying and simulating different personas based on task inputs, SPP unleashes the potential of cognitive synergy in LLMs. Our in-depth analysis shows that assigning multiple fine-grained personas in LLMs improves problem-solving abilities compared to using a single or fixed number of personas. We evaluate SPP on three challenging tasks: Trivia Creative Writing, Codenames Collaborative, and Logic Grid Puzzle, encompassing both knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive types. Unlike previous works, such as Chain-of-Thought, that solely enhance the reasoning abilities in LLMs, experimental results demonstrate that SPP effectively reduces factual hallucination, and maintains stro