Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought
Also called zero-shot CoT, let's think step by step.
Zero-shot chain-of-thought prompting triggers step-by-step reasoning without examples by appending a cue such as "Let's think step by step" to the question.
Description
Kojima et al. showed this single phrase produced large accuracy gains on arithmetic and logic benchmarks. The method uses a second prompt to extract the final answer from the generated reasoning.
Sources
- Kojima et al. (2022). Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners.
Cite this entry
Protologue. (2026). Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought. In Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques (v1.0.0, PTL-0025). https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/
BibTeX
@misc{protologue_zero_shot_chain_of_thought,
title = {Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought},
author = {{Protologue}},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Protologue: A Taxonomy of Prompting and LLM Techniques, v1.0.0},
note = {Entry PTL-0025},
url = {https://protologue.com/t/zero-shot-chain-of-thought/}
}