Chain of thought

How it is used

Written with hyphens before a noun: chain-of-thought prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning. Shortened to CoT. It was first triggered with prompts such as 'think step by step'; many newer models are trained to reason this way on their own.

Example sentences

1. Chain-of-thought prompting fixed most of the arithmetic mistakes.

2. We hide the chain of thought from users and show only the final answer.

Common collocations

• chain-of-thought prompting
• chain-of-thought reasoning
• CoT
• think step by step

Related terms

• prompt engineeringThe practice of designing, testing and improving prompts so that a model gives accurate, useful and consistent outputs for a task.
• few-shot promptingGiving a model a few worked examples of a task inside the prompt, so that it can follow the same pattern for a new input without any extra training.
• LLMShort for large language model: a very large neural network trained on huge amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it answer questions, write, summarize and code.
• promptThe text or other input given to a generative model to tell it what to do, such as a question, an instruction or a few examples followed by a task.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• chain of thought · Software Engineering

More terms: Prompts and Retrieval

• system prompt
• RAG
• vector database