Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. Wei, J., Wang, X., Schuurmans, D., Bosma, M., Ichter, B., Xia, F., Chi, E., Le, Q., & Zhou, D. January, 2023. arXiv:2201.11903 [cs]
Paper doi abstract bibtex We explore how generating a chain of thought – a series of intermediate reasoning steps – significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge naturally in sufficiently large language models via a simple method called chain of thought prompting, where a few chain of thought demonstrations are provided as exemplars in prompting. Experiments on three large language models show that chain of thought prompting improves performance on a range of arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks. The empirical gains can be striking. For instance, prompting a 540B-parameter language model with just eight chain of thought exemplars achieves state of the art accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing even finetuned GPT-3 with a verifier.
@misc{wei2023ChainofThought,
title = {Chain-of-{Thought} {Prompting} {Elicits} {Reasoning} in {Large} {Language} {Models}},
url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2201.11903},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2201.11903},
abstract = {We explore how generating a chain of thought -- a series of intermediate reasoning steps -- significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge naturally in sufficiently large language models via a simple method called chain of thought prompting, where a few chain of thought demonstrations are provided as exemplars in prompting. Experiments on three large language models show that chain of thought prompting improves performance on a range of arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks. The empirical gains can be striking. For instance, prompting a 540B-parameter language model with just eight chain of thought exemplars achieves state of the art accuracy on the GSM8K benchmark of math word problems, surpassing even finetuned GPT-3 with a verifier.},
urldate = {2026-03-03},
publisher = {arXiv},
author = {Wei, Jason and Wang, Xuezhi and Schuurmans, Dale and Bosma, Maarten and Ichter, Brian and Xia, Fei and Chi, Ed and Le, Quoc and Zhou, Denny},
month = jan,
year = {2023},
note = {arXiv:2201.11903 [cs]},
keywords = {Reasoning},
}
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