Chain-of-Thought

Also known as: CoT

Chain-of-thought prompting elicits intermediate reasoning steps from a language model before it produces a final answer. By generating a verbal walkthrough of the reasoning process, the model externalizes computation that would otherwise happen implicitly inside a single forward pass, catching errors and improving accuracy on arithmetic, logic, and multi-hop knowledge questions. CoT is a cornerstone technique for making model reasoning inspectable and correctable.