# Automatic Chain-of-Thought

> Automatic chain-of-thought (Auto-CoT) builds chain-of-thought demonstrations without manual writing, by clustering questions for diversity and generating a reasoning chain for a representative of each cluster with zero-shot CoT.

- Identifier: PTL-0027
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/auto-cot/
- Also known as: Auto-CoT
- Introduced: 2022

## Description

Diversity across clusters limits the damage from mistakes in any single generated chain, and the approach matched manually written CoT exemplars on several benchmarks.

## Broader terms

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-thought/)

## Related terms

- [Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought](https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/)
- [Exemplar Selection](https://protologue.com/t/exemplar-selection/)

## Sources

- Zhang et al. (2022). Automatic Chain of Thought Prompting in Large Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03493

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Automatic Chain-of-Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0027). https://protologue.com/t/auto-cot/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)