# Chain of Density

> 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.

- Identifier: PTL-0120
- Category: Self-Critique & Verification
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/chain-of-density/
- Also known as: CoD summarization
- Introduced: 2023

## 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.

## Broader terms

- [Self-Refine](https://protologue.com/t/self-refine/)

## Related terms

- [Prompt Chaining](https://protologue.com/t/prompt-chaining/)

## Sources

- Adams et al. (2023). From Sparse to Dense: GPT-4 Summarization with Chain of Density Prompting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04269

## Cite this entry

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/

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