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Zero-Shot Chain of Thought

Zero-shot chain of thought is a prompting technique where you append a simple phrase like "Let's think step by step" to a question without providing any reasoning examples. This minimal addition triggers the model to generate intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at a final answer, often dramatically improving accuracy on math, logic, and multi-step problems compared to direct zero-shot prompting.

Example

Without zero-shot CoT: "Q: If a store has 15 apples and sells 40% of them, how many are left? A: 8" (wrong). With zero-shot CoT: "Q: If a store has 15 apples and sells 40% of them, how many are left? Let's think step by step." The model then reasons: "40% of 15 = 6 apples sold. 15 - 6 = 9 apples left." (correct)

Related Terms

Chain of Thought PromptingZero-Shot PromptingReasoning ModelFew-Shot Chain of Thought

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