Unleashing the Emergent Cognitive Synergy in Large Language Models: A Task-Solving Agent through Multi-Persona Self-Collaboration

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 strong reasoning capabilities. Additionally, comparative experiments show that cognitive synergy only emerges in GPT-4 and does not appear in less capable models, such as GPT-3.5-turbo and Llama2-13b-chat, which draws an interesting analogy to human development. Code, data, and prompts can be found at: https://github.com/MikeWangWZHL/Solo-Performance-Prompting.git.