Nathan
0e0efb922f
- Add Frank.core.agent.md: 11 ## [BRACKET] sections → XML tags (<role>, <personality>, <commands>, <workflows>, etc.) - Add 7 skills/ files: semantic XML wrappers added, corrupted/missing YAML frontmatter repaired across 3 files - Add 8 specialties/ files: 95 bracket-notation sections converted to XML tags via structured tag mapping - Add 6 knowledge/ files: wrapped in <example> tags; CoT exemplars structured with <thinking> and <answer> blocks - Add ARCHITECTURE.md + copilot-instructions.md: human-readable docs describing the Anthropic-targeted variant of the v6 suite
83 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
83 lines
3.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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description: "Chain-of-Thought prompting techniques and implementation guide, covering Few-Shot, Zero-Shot, and Auto-CoT with prompt templates and references."
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applyTo: "**"
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---
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<cot_techniques>
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# Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting Engine Guide
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## 1. Prompting Techniques
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There are three primary methods for implementing CoT prompting, each with its own advantages.
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### 2.1. Few-Shot CoT
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This is the standard approach where you provide the model with a few examples (demonstrations) that include a question, a step-by-step reasoning process (the chain of thought), and the final answer.
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**When to Use:** Use this method for complex tasks where the reasoning structure is consistent and providing diverse, high-quality examples can significantly guide the model. This is the most powerful method but requires manual effort to create the demonstrations.
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**Example Prompt Structure:**
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Q: [Question 1]
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A: [Step-by-step reasoning for Question 1]. The answer is [Answer 1].
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Q: [Question 2]
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A: [Step-by-step reasoning for Question 2]. The answer is [Answer 2].
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Q: [New Question]
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A:
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The file demos/multiarith_manual provides a practical example of the JSON structure for these hand-crafted demonstrations.
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### 2.2. Zero-Shot CoT
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A surprisingly effective and simple method that requires no examples. By appending the phrase **"Let's think step by step"** to the end of a question, the model is triggered to generate a reasoning chain before giving the final answer.
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**When to Use:** This is an excellent starting point for any reasoning task. It's highly effective for its simplicity and is particularly useful when you don't have time to create few-shot examples.
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**Example Prompt Structure:**
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Q: [New Question]
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A: Let's think step by step.
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The api.py script in the repository shows how this is implemented by setting a cot_trigger argument. The Jupyter notebooks (try_cot.ipynb and try_cot_colab.ipynb) demonstrate its application and output.
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### 2.3. Automatic CoT (Auto-CoT)
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Auto-CoT is an advanced technique designed to automate the creation of diverse and effective demonstrations for Few-Shot CoT, eliminating the manual effort. As detailed in the project's README.md, it works in two main stages.
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**Stage 1: Question Clustering**
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* The system takes a dataset of questions and groups them into several clusters based on semantic similarity.
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**Stage 2: Demonstration Sampling**
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* It selects a representative question from each cluster.
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* It then uses **Zero-Shot CoT** to automatically generate a reasoning chain for each selected question.
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This process, detailed in run_demo.py, ensures that the examples are both diverse (by sampling from different clusters) and accurate, creating a robust set of demonstrations for the model to learn from. The output of this process can be seen in the demos/multiarith_auto file.
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**When to Use:** Use Auto-CoT when you need the high performance of Few-Shot CoT on a large dataset of questions but want to avoid the time-consuming and potentially suboptimal process of manually writing demonstrations.
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## 3. Implementation in the Repository
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The provided repository contains a full implementation of these techniques.
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* **api.py**: A core file that defines the cot function, which can be called with different methods: "zero_shot", "zero_shot_cot", "manual_cot", and "auto_cot".
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* **run_inference.py**: The main script for running experiments. It loads a dataset, constructs prompts based on the chosen method, and generates answers.
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* **run_demo.py**: This script implements the Auto-CoT process by clustering questions and generating demonstrations.
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* **try_cot.ipynb**: A Jupyter Notebook that provides a quick and clear way to test and compare the outputs of each CoT method.
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To get started, refer to the README.md and the try_cot_colab.ipynb for a guided walkthrough.
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## 4. References
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* [Amazon Science Repo on CoT](https://github.com/amazon-science/auto-cot)
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* [CoT Example](../knowledge/example.CoT-Prompting.md)
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</cot_techniques> |