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Definition

Chain of thought: prompting or training a model to emit intermediate reasoning steps before its final answer, which reliably helps on multi-step arithmetic, logic, and word problems. It can be elicited by few-shot exemplars, by an instruction, or trained in on reasoning traces. One caveat matters a lot: the printed chain is generated text, not a transcript of the computation, so it can be fluent and still not explain why the model answered as it did.