kojima-2022-zero-shot-cot-prompt
IN premise — summaries/2026/08/24/shen-2023-icl-not-gd-sR-references.md
Created 2026-08-25T02:58:34+00:00
Kojima et al. (2022) showed that appending 'Let's think step by step' as a zero-shot prompt elicits reasoning without any demonstrations, a mechanism distinct from few-shot ICL.
Summary
A single short phrase like "think step by step" can trigger reasoning in a language model without showing it any examples, meaning the ability to break problems down is something you can invoke directly rather than having to demonstrate through careful few-shot prompting. This matters because it separates the "how to reason" skill from the "here's what reasoning looks like" pattern-matching, suggesting reasoning is a latent capability that can be unlocked with minimal scaffolding.