Program-Aided Language Models
Also called PAL.
Program-aided language models (PAL) have the model write a program, typically Python, that expresses its reasoning, and then delegate the actual computation to an interpreter.
Description
Offloading arithmetic and logic to code removes calculation errors from the model's output, and PAL outperformed much larger chain-of-thought models on math word problems.
Sources
- Gao et al. (2022). PAL: Program-aided Language Models.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Program-Aided Language Models. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0045). https://protologue.com/t/program-aided-language-models/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_program_aided_language_models,
title = {Program-Aided Language Models},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0045},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/program-aided-language-models/}
}