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COMPEL Glossary / chain-of-thought-cot
Chain-of-thought (CoT)
A prompt pattern that elicits intermediate reasoning steps before the final answer — either zero-shot ("Let's think step by step") or few-shot with example reasoning chains.
What this means in practice
Consistently improves performance on multi-step reasoning tasks at larger model scales; governance concerns include verbosity cost and the risk that generated reasoning is post-hoc rather than causal.
Synonyms
chain of thought , step-by-step prompting , CoT prompting
See also
- Self-consistency — A meta-prompting technique that samples multiple independent reasoning paths (via temperature > 0) and selects the most frequent final answer — improving accuracy on multi-step reasoning tasks at the cost of proportional compute.
- Few-shot prompting — A prompt pattern in which the prompt includes labeled examples demonstrating the desired input-output behavior before the real task.
- Zero-shot prompting — A prompt pattern in which the model receives only an instruction — no labeled examples of the desired input-output behavior.
- ReAct — An agentic prompt pattern interleaving reasoning steps (Thought) and action steps (Act — typically a tool call) over multiple turns, with observations from each action feeding the next reasoning step.