Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Jason Wei et al. · NeurIPS 2022
arXiv:2201.11903
In short
Showing a large model a few worked examples that spell out intermediate steps makes it write out its own reasoning before answering. That alone sharply improves arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning, but only in sufficiently large models.
Why it matters
Thinking step by step went from a prompt trick to the basis of today’s reasoning models.
Read first
The 4 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.
Starting from scratch? The full route 22 ideas · basics first
- Natural Language Processing ✓ understood
The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.
- Token ✓ understood
The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.
- Tokenization ✓ understood
Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.
- Language Modeling ✓ understood
Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.
- Dataset ✓ understood
A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.
- Training ✓ understood
The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.
- Machine Learning ✓ understood
Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.
- Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood
Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.
- Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood
Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).
- Pre-training ✓ understood
Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.
- Feature ✓ understood
A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.
- Neural Network ✓ understood
A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.
- Deep Learning ✓ understood
A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.
- Representation Learning ✓ understood
Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.
- Embedding ✓ understood
A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.
- Attention Mechanism ✓ understood
A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.
- Transformer ✓ understood
A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.
- Large Language Model · read first ✓ understood
A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.
- Prompt Engineering · read first ✓ understood
The practice of designing and optimizing input prompts to get desired outputs from language models. A crucial skill for effectively using LLMs.
- In-Context Learning ✓ understood
The ability of LLMs to learn from examples and instructions provided in the input prompt without training.
- Few-Shot Learning · read first ✓ understood
Learning to perform a task from a small number of examples provided in the prompt, without parameter updates.
- Chain-of-Thought · read first ✓ understood
A prompting technique where the model explains its reasoning step-by-step before giving a final answer, improving complex reasoning.