chain-of-thought (CoT)

What is chain-of-thought (CoT)?

Chain-of-thought, abbreviated CoT, is the sequence of intermediate reasoning steps that a language model generates before producing its final answer.

Instead of jumping directly from a question to an answer,

$Question\to Answer$

the model produces a sequence such as:

$Question\to Step1\to Step2\to Step3\to Finalanswer$