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AI & Machine Learning · Intermediate

Chain-of-Thought Prompting (CoT)

Prompting a model to reason step by step before giving a final answer.

Definition

Asking the model to show intermediate reasoning improves accuracy on math, logic and multi-step problems. It can be zero-shot ('think step by step') or few-shot with worked examples. Reasoning models perform this natively.

Exam tip

CoT helps multi-step reasoning; it adds output tokens and latency.

Related terms