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COMPEL Glossary / self-consistency

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.

What this means in practice

Used where per-call correctness is more valuable than per-call cost.

Synonyms

self-consistency decoding , majority-vote reasoning

See also

  • 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.
  • Reflection — An agentic prompt pattern where the model critiques and revises its own output — typically after tool-call feedback or detected error — before returning a final answer.