Inference & optimisation
Chain of thought
Intermediate reasoning steps produced or used while solving a task.
Also known as: CoT
Definition
Chain-of-thought methods encourage a model to decompose a problem into steps before providing its final answer.
Why it matters
Reasoning traces can aid debugging but are not guaranteed to be faithful explanations and may reveal sensitive context.
Related concepts
- Reasoning model
A model optimised to spend additional computation solving complex tasks.
- Inference budget
The compute, token, time or attempt allowance given to solve a task.
- Explainability
Methods that help people understand why a model produced an outcome.