# Universal Self-Consistency

> Universal self-consistency extends self-consistency to free-form outputs by asking the model itself to select the most consistent response among several samples, instead of counting exact-match answers.

- Identifier: PTL-0029
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/universal-self-consistency/
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

This makes sampling-and-selecting usable for tasks such as summarization and open-ended question answering, where answers rarely match word for word.

## Broader terms

- [Self-Consistency](https://protologue.com/t/self-consistency/)

## Related terms

- [LLM-as-a-Judge](https://protologue.com/t/llm-as-a-judge/)

## Sources

- Chen et al. (2023). Universal Self-Consistency for Large Language Model Generation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17311

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Universal Self-Consistency. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0029). https://protologue.com/t/universal-self-consistency/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)