{
  "id": "chain-of-density",
  "code": "PTL-0120",
  "term": "Chain of Density",
  "aliases": [
    "CoD summarization"
  ],
  "category": "verification",
  "definition": "Chain of Density is a summarization prompt that has the model write a summary and then repeatedly rewrite it, adding a few missing important entities each time without making it longer, to produce progressively denser summaries.",
  "description": "Each round forces compression and fusion of content, so later summaries carry more information per word. The authors found human readers preferred summaries partway through the chain, denser than a plain summary but not maximally dense, which makes the number of rounds a tunable trade-off between informativeness and readability.",
  "example": null,
  "broader": [
    "self-refine"
  ],
  "narrower": [],
  "related": [
    "prompt-chaining"
  ],
  "introduced": 2023,
  "added": "2026-10-10",
  "sources": [
    {
      "title": "From Sparse to Dense: GPT-4 Summarization with Chain of Density Prompting",
      "authors": "Adams et al.",
      "year": 2023,
      "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04269"
    }
  ],
  "url": "https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-density/",
  "citation": "Protologue. (2026). Chain of Density. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.4.0, PTL-0120). https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-density/"
}