TypedThinker: Typed Thinking Improves Large Language Model Reasoning

Despite significant advancements in the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), the lack of diverse reasoning solutions often makes them trapped in a limited solution search area. In this paper, we propose TypedThinker, a novel framework that enhances LLMs' problem-solving abilities by incorporating multiple reasoning types (deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical). Our analysis across four benchmarks reveals that different reasoning types uniquely solve distinct sets of problems, highlighting the importance of diverse thinking approaches. TypedThinker addresses two key challenges: selecting appropriate reasoning types for given problems and effectively implementing specific reasoning types. Through self-training on successful experiences, TypedThinker learns an implicit policy for reasoning type selection and application. Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements over baseline models, with accuracy increases of 3.4% for Mistral 7B and 16.7% for LLaMA3 8B across four reasoning benchmarks. Notably, TypedThinker shows effective generalization to new benchmarks and can further enhance the reasoning capability of powerful models like GPT-4o. The code is released at https://github.com/dqwang122/ThinkHub.