When designing prompts for a large language model to perform a complex reasoning task, such...

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is an advanced prompt engineering technique that significantly enhances a large language model’s (LLM) performance on complex reasoning tasks, such as multi-step mathematical problems. By including examples that explicitly demonstrate step-by-step reasoning in the prompt, CoT guides the model to break down the problem into intermediate steps, improving accuracy and robustness. NVIDIA’s NeMo documentation on prompt engineering highlights CoT as a powerful method for tasks requiring logical or sequential reasoning, as it leverages the model’s ability to mimic structured problem-solving. Research by Wei et al. (2022) demonstrates that CoT outperforms other methods for mathematical reasoning. Option A (zero-shot) is less effective for complex tasks due to lack of guidance. Option B (few-shot with random examples) is suboptimal without structured reasoning. Option D (RAG) is useful for factual queries but less relevant for pure reasoning tasks.