Chain-Of-Thought Prompting In LLMs

In principle chain-of-thought prompting allows for the decomposition of multi-step requests into intermediate steps.

Cobus Greyling
3 min readApr 20, 2023

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Chain-of-thought prompting enables large language models (LLMs) to address complex tasks like common sense reasoning and arithmetic.

Establishing chain-of-thought reasoning via prompt engineering and instructing the LLM accordingly is quite straight-forward to implement.

Inference can be established via chain-of-thought prompting.

Below is a very good illustration of standard LLM prompting on the left, and chain-of-thought prompting on the right.

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What is particularly helpful of Chain-Of-Thought Prompting is that by decomposing the LLM input and LLM output, it creates a window of insight and interpretation.

This Window of decomposition allows for manageable granularity for both input and output, and tweaking the system is made easier.

Chain-Of-Thought Prompting is ideal for contextual reasoning like word problems, common-sense reasoning, math word problems and is very much applicable to any task that we as humans can solve via language.

The image below shows a comparison of percentage solve rate based on standard prompting and chain-of-thought prompting.

Chain of thought reasoning provides reasoning demonstration examples via prompt engineering.

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In Conclusion

In essence chain of thought reasoning can be achieve by creating intermediate reasoning steps to incorporate in the prompt.

The ability of LLMs to perform complex reasoning improves significantly.

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Cobus Greyling

I explore and write about all things at the intersection of AI & language; LLMs/NLP/NLU, Chat/Voicebots, CCAI. www.cobusgreyling.com