few-shot cot

**Few-shot CoT** is the **prompting approach that provides worked reasoning examples to teach both task solution pattern and intermediate-step style** - it improves structured reasoning consistency on complex tasks. **What Is Few-shot CoT?** - **Definition**: Combination of few-shot demonstrations and chain-of-thought rationale in each example. - **Guidance Effect**: Shows not only the answer format but also the desired reasoning trajectory. - **Task Fit**: Strong for heterogeneous reasoning tasks where zero-shot triggers are inconsistent. - **Token Tradeoff**: Higher prompt cost due to inclusion of multi-step demonstrations. **Why Few-shot CoT Matters** - **Reasoning Robustness**: Demonstration-guided rationale improves consistency across hard inputs. - **Format Fidelity**: Encourages stable intermediate-step and final-answer structure. - **Error Reduction**: Reduces hallucinated shortcuts by anchoring to exemplars. - **Domain Steering**: Allows injection of domain-specific reasoning norms. - **Method Synergy**: Often pairs effectively with self-consistency for additional gains. **How It Is Used in Practice** - **Exemplar Selection**: Include diverse problems with correct, concise reasoning and clean final answers. - **Prompt Compression**: Keep examples compact to preserve context for target question. - **Benchmarking**: Evaluate benefit relative to token cost and latency constraints. Few-shot CoT is **a powerful prompt-engineering technique for complex reasoning workflows** - curated reasoning examples can materially improve reliability when simple zero-shot cues are insufficient.