Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning

Asking sequenced questions that guide someone (or yourself) through a reasoning path is a core technique in problem-solving and teaching. Examples:

  • “What is the known information?”
  • “What is being asked?”
  • “What patterns can we observe?”
  • “What similar problems have we solved before?”

Used in in AI systems is a cognitive-inspired framework that improves the performance of large language models (LLMs) by explicitly guiding the AI through intermediate reasoning steps.

Advantages of Chain of Thought:

  • Improved Interpretability: Since the model outputs intermediate steps, it’s easier for humans to understand how the final answer was reached.
  • Better Performance on Complex Tasks: CoT allows the model to handle multi-step reasoning more effectively.
  • Easier Debugging: If there’s an error in reasoning, it can be spotted at a specific step in the chain, which aids in model fine-tuning and debugging.

Related to: