Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting

Last updated on November 12, 2024

Chain-of-Thought Prompting is a Few-Shot prompting technique in which the user feeds the LLM a prompt that demands a thought process before giving the final answer. Usually, an example of the thought process is given before asking for an answer (hence the Few-Shot nature of the prompt). A common example is:

Q: Jack has two baskets, each containing three balls. How many balls does Jack have in total?
A: One basket contains 3 balls, so two baskets contain 3 * 2 = 6 balls.
Q: [the question for inference] 
A:

Footnotes

  1. Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., Bosma, M., Ichter, B., Xia, F., Chi, E., Le, Q., & Zhou, D. (2022). Chain of Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models.


© 2025 Learn Prompting. All rights reserved.