# Contrastive Chain-of-Thought

> Contrastive chain-of-thought adds both valid and deliberately invalid reasoning demonstrations to a prompt, so the model learns which mistakes to avoid as well as what correct reasoning looks like.

- Identifier: PTL-0038
- Category: Reasoning Elicitation
- Canonical URL: https://protologue.com/t/contrastive-chain-of-thought/
- Introduced: 2023

## Description

The invalid demonstrations can be generated automatically by perturbing correct reasoning chains.

## Broader terms

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

## Sources

- Chia et al. (2023). Contrastive Chain-of-Thought Prompting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09277

## Cite this entry

Protologue. (2026). Contrastive Chain-of-Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0038). https://protologue.com/t/contrastive-chain-of-thought/

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