A Large-Scale Evaluation of Role-Enhanced Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Prompting

Ibrahim Khan, Thai Van Nguyen, Yi Xia, Pratch Suntichaikul, Mustafa Can Gursesli +3

This paper proposes Role-Enhanced Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought (RE-ZS-CoT), a prompting framework that systematically integrates domain-specific expert roles to enhance reasoning in large language models (LLMs) without task-specific examples. We assess two versions of our approach. In the first version, static role selection, we evaluate eight predefined expert roles across arithmetic, commonsense, and reading comprehension benchmarks to determine their impact on reasoning performance. In the second version, dynamic role selection, each model autonomously selects the single most suitable role for each benchmark, enabling adaptive task-role alignment without manual specification. Across 20 LLMs and seven benchmarks, RE-ZS-CoT frequently surpasses zero-shot and zero-shot-CoT baselines, achieving performance improvements of up to 44 percentage points. The results reveal a strong correspondence between static and dynamic versions; the benchmarks where static roles yielded improvements were almost always those where dynamic roles also outperformed baselines, though static selection achieved peak performance. Ablation studies further show that unconventional roles degrade performance,…