Language & LLMs Jan 2022

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
  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  4. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  5. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  9. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  10. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  11. 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.

  12. 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.

  13. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  14. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  18. 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.

  19. 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.

  20. In-Context Learning ✓ understood

    The ability of LLMs to learn from examples and instructions provided in the input prompt without training.

  21. Few-Shot Learning · read first ✓ understood

    Learning to perform a task from a small number of examples provided in the prompt, without parameter updates.

  22. 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.

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